Are you interested in time travel? Have you ever wanted to see the America of Robert Frost or Paul Bunyan? An exciting opportunity awaits on the second floor of the Hood Museum.
The exhibition "Looking for America: Prints of Rural Life from the 1930s and 1940s" explores the north, south, east, and west of the United States in the period of hardship preceding World War II.
The collection also focuses on the themes of rural transportation, American legends, small-town life, and labor.
The technical aspects of the prints in this exhibit are amazing. A print is started by sketching on or cutting a picture into wood or metal.
When the picture is covered with ink and pressed against a piece of paper, the image comes off on the paper and makes a print.
The result of this method is an intricate mixture of shadows and patterns that somehow form entire, detailed scenes.
The convenience, quality result, and affordability of this method made it desirable to the regionalist artists of the 1930s, who wanted their art to be able to reach everyone, regardless of economic status.
"These are very rich documents of that period. What comes through is a sense of urgency both to capture and embrace what were viewed as distinctly American values and subject matter and to make the prints widely accessible," said Hood Museum Curator of American Art Barbara MacAdam.
The Regionalists, on whom the exhibit concentrates, celebrated the peaceful interactions of America's land and its inhabitants. The prints reflect this in their landscapes, hard-working people, and small-town themes.
In fact, sometimes the Regionalists created prints which idealized the land, depicting it as untouched by modern machines even though the industry of the time was coming up with new inventions every day.
The fields and storms of American Midwestern country are captured in Grant Wood's "March," which shows a farmer with his horse and plow, trees bending over in a gust of wind. Wood's "Fruits" and "Vegetables" are still-life monuments to the perfection and practical beauty of the abundant harvests in the Midwest.
The New England prints, inspired originally by writers in the 1920s and 1930s like Dorothy Fisher and Robert Frost, show the rocky landscape and snow of the area, as well as examples of New England architecture and local ways of labor.
Luigi Lucioni's "Trees and Mountains" embraces this land with detail so minute that every leaf can be seen on the trees. Herbert Ogden Waters' "The Little Sugar House" depicts the springtime practice of maple sugaring in New England.
The west is represented in the spirit of the day, as the "untapped potential of the nation," the region perhaps most reminiscent of American myths and identity.
Alexandre Hogue's "Desert Glare" shows the sun breaking through a cloud to reveal a desert home of cactus, visited by a man on a horse. Windmills, the usual signature of Thomas Hart Benton, are used in the western prints as testimony to the competence of pre-industrial agrarian technology.
Prints of the south, which is the center of Regionalist literature, illustrate the unique architecture, agriculture, and climate of the area, as well as the importance of religion and an easy pace of life.
John McCrady's "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" combines these focal points into one nighttime scene, showing a literal interpretation of the spiritual as a horse-drawn chariot of angels swoops down from the sky to claim a dying African-American man from his cabin in the middle of fields.
Thomas Hart Benton's "Goin' Home" is a picture of two children on the back of a cart struggling over the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, exhausted by the hard ride home.
The other areas of the exhibits examine social factors of the 1930s. Prints on the issue of rural transportation, starring highways and steam engines, show an emotional struggle between the desire for permanence versus the desire for change.
Traditional legends of America are illustrated in a group of prints which capture scenes from the lives of Frankie and Johnny, Paul Bunyan, Rip vanWinkle and other characters.
Prints of small-town life show picturesque country societies that emphasize community values, always walking a line between being neighborly or nosy, predictable or boring, and proud or self-promoting.
Finally, the prints of American labor involve the hard work of miners, farmers, and loggers among others hoping the American work ethic will carry them through the Depression.
In light of the turbulent socioeconomic climate at the time, the prints present an optimistic and nostalgic glimpse of American life.
"Looking for America" will be on exhibit through March 5th. Special programs on the exhibit include a Gallery Talk by Barbara MacAdam, curator, at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 1st, and Festival Day, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Feb. 11th.
Festival Day is presented in conjunction with the Hopkins Center and it features performances, studio art demonstrations, and displays of art work created by regional school children in response to the exhibiton.
A 30 minute tour of the exhibit will also be given this Saturday Jan. 21st at 2:00 p.m.
