CONTACTAbout UsCAREER OPPORTUNITIESADVERTISE WITH USPRIVACY POLICYPRIVACY PREFERENCESTERMS OF USELEGAL NOTICE
© 2025 Pride Publishing Inc.
All Rights reserved
All Rights reserved
Scroll To Top









![]()
By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Private Policy and Terms of Use.
Above: Grant Wood, "American Gothic," 1930. Read more below.
Oil on composition board, 30 3/4 x 25 3/4 in. (78 x 65.3 cm). Art Institute of Chicago; Friends of American Art Collection 1930.934. (c) Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph courtesy Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY
Add Grant Wood's name to the list of queer artists that have created the history's most iconic images: Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Warhol, and with perhaps the most misunderstood painting in the art world, Grant Wood's American Gothic. First false assumption: the couple pictured are man and wife. Nope, he intended that to be father and daughter. And as many already know, the women who posed for the painting was his litigous sister. Second false assumption: the painting represents the flinty Midwestern spirit of the American farm family. Nope, Wood intended it to be more ironic and a parody of the uptight Midwestern frame of mind, not unlike the last image in this gallery, Daughters of the Revolution. Looking more closely at his work, and knowing this was a man who was working hard to push the gay down, adds depth and acid wit to much of his work.
The current Grant Wood retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art reassesses the career of an under-known artist, giving center stage to his most famous work, American Gothic, an indelible emblem of Americana, which will be making a rare voyage from the Art Institute of Chicago for the occasion. Curated by the Whitney's Barbara Haskell with Sarah Humphreville, this exhibition is the most comprehensive Wood retrospective ever mounted, the first in a New York museum since 1983, and only the third survey of his work held outside the Midwest since 1935. It will be on view in the Whitney's fifth-floor Neil Bluhm Family Galleries now through June 10, 2018.
As Barbara Haskell has noted, "Today it is clear that the enduring power of Wood's art owes as much to its mesmerizing psychological ambiguity as to its archetypal Midwestern imagery. An eerie silence and disquiet runs throughout his work, complicating its seemingly bucolic, elegiac appearance. The tension between Wood's desire to recapture the imagined world of his childhood and his instincts as a shy, sexually closeted Midwesterner seeped into his art, endowing it with an unsettling solitude and chilling sense of make-believe. By subconsciously expressing his conflicted relationship to the homeland he professed to adore, Wood created hypnotic works that address the unresolved tensions of the American experience."
Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney's Alice Pratt Brown Director, in his foreword to the exhibition catalogue, writes that rather than celebrating a nostalgic American past that never was, the exhibition is "a quest to understand how a remarkable artist created mythic images, images that are not as unequivocal or as unambiguous as some might think or, yet, as some might wish...What one discovers, looking deeply into Wood's paintings, is that, for all their apparent clarity and precision of style, in the best of them what is depicted is not at all straightforward. The images put forth are often conflicting and ambiguous. They reveal a collision of amplified meanings, sublimated feelings, and layered evidence."
xtyfr
xtyfr
More Galleries
Christopher Harrity
Christopher Harrity is the Manager of Online Production for Here Media, parent company to The Advocate and Out. He enjoys assembling online features on artists and photographers, and you can often find him poring over the mouldering archives of the magazines.
Christopher Harrity is the Manager of Online Production for Here Media, parent company to The Advocate and Out. He enjoys assembling online features on artists and photographers, and you can often find him poring over the mouldering archives of the magazines.