Stone City Art Colony

Instructors at the Stone City Art Colony. (left to right) Grant Wood,
Dave McCosh, Edward B. Rowan, Arnold Pyle, Adrian Dornbush,
and Marvin Cone. Not pictured Florence Sprague Smith

The road to Stone City curved through corn and limestone, pale as bone. The air buzzed with heat. You could smell the river before you saw it.

Then — laughter. Wild, unfiltered laughter bouncing off the quarry walls. That’s how you knew you’d found it.

It was 1932. The country was broke. So were most of the people who came here. They brought brushes, bedrolls, debts. Hope too, the kind that doesn’t last long but burns bright.

Grant Wood was on the porch when they arrived. Round glasses, overalls, a grin that could mean anything. “Don’t just stand there,” he shouted. “Grab a brush or grab a beer!”

Someone did both. Someone else tripped on a paint bucket. It began like that.

The Stone City Art Colony. Fifty bucks for the summer — if you had it. If you didn’t, nobody asked.

Sculptor Florence Sprague Smith

Sculptor Florence Sprague Smith

Florence Sprague said the stone talked if you let it. She’d hand you a hammer, point to a block, and tell you, “Stop thinking. Listen.” If someone asked her what she meant, she’d shrugged. “Everything worth saying’s already in the rock,” she said. “You just have to shut up long enough to hear it.”

People said she had farmer’s hands and a pianist’s patience. In 1914 she created a bronze called Joy of Labor—a woman mid-stride, sleeves rolled, muscles showing. The Des Moines Register described it as “simple and strong, a hymn to honest work.” 

“Work is beautiful if you let it be,” she told a student who complained about mixing plaster. That was Florence: no theory, just doing. “You don’t need Paris,” she’d say. “You need a place to stand and something worth hitting.”

When Grant Wood started his Stone City Art Colony in the early ’30s, she packed her tools and went. The colony was supposed to give Midwestern artists a reason to stay home instead of chasing New York glory. Florence didn’t need convincing. “We’ve got better stone,” she said, tapping the local limestone. “And cheaper rent.”

Iowa Artist Grant Wood

Grant Wood

Grant Wood painted what he knew. The land, the fences, the tired faces that came with the work. He didn’t go looking for beauty. He figured if it was anywhere, it was probably hiding in Iowa.

Wood liked to draw. He worked with his hands doing tin work, sign painting, whatever paid the rent. He wanted to be an artist, but that sounded like a joke in Iowa. Nobody knew any artists. Nobody even knew what one was supposed to do.

He went to Chicago, learned design, then went to Europe to see what all the fuss was about. Paris. Munich. Brussels. He saw paintings that could make a man dizzy, brushstrokes that looked like lightning, and German painters so precise they made bones look carved. He took it all in. Then he came home.

That’s when things changed. He started noticing the way the light slid across a barn roof. How the land folded like cloth. How a face could hold an entire story and still say nothing. He said, “All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.” He meant it.

In 1930, he painted American Gothic. You’ve seen it. Everyone has. The farmer with the pitchfork. The woman beside him. The white house with the church window. Everything sharp, still, and strangely quiet.