Grant Wood (American, 1891-1942) Grant Wood was born on February 13, 1891, on a farm near the small town of Anamosa, Iowa. Immediately after graduating high school, he entered the summer term of the Minneapolis School of Design, Handicraft, and Normal Art and went on to study life drawing at the University of Iowa and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood attained national stature in 1930 with the painting American Gothic and came to be regarded as one of the three primary artists of American regionalism, along with Thomas Hart Benton (American, 1889 - 1975) and John Steuart Curry (American, 1897 - 1946). Once he had established his reputation, Wood was appointed director of the New Deal Public Works Art Project in Iowa in 1934, and started teaching at the University of Iowa later that year. Wood embraced his role as a fully American artist, making art that was American in style and imagery, teaching the next generation about about Regionalism and creating a down-home, overalls-wearing persona to go with it. Wood had little experience in printmaking prior to beginning his work in lithography as a U of I professor. As a consummate, sensitive draftsman, the medium was natural to him; yet during his lifetime, Grant Wood produced only nineteen lithographs. Wood’s lithographs were created in the last half decade of his life and they were the locus of much of his artistic efforts in that period, when he painted only a handful of pictures and spent a great deal of time lecturing. As a group, the prints constitute around one fourth of the artist’s mature body of work.