Adaptive Aeriality: Grant Wood, the Midwestern Landscape and Modernity

Black and White image: Aerial Survey Photograph of Grundy County, Iowa, United States Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 1939, United States National Archives, Washington; Color image: Grant Wood, Spring Turning, 1936, Oil on Masonite

The University of Arkansas Department if Art is pleased to present Adaptive Aeriality: Grant Wood, the Midwestern Landscape, & Modernity, by visiting scholar Jason D. Weems at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, April 23, in Hillside Auditorium, Room 206.

Jason D. Weems is a specialist in American art, photography, and visual/material culture from the colonial period to the present. His research focuses on often-overlooked objects, images and perceptual interplays. Its goal is to illuminate the way that meaning is produced across levels of representation through overarching paradigms of visual experience. Weems' current book manuscript, entitled Barnstorming the Prairies: Flight, Aerial Vision and Modernity in Rural America, 1920-1940, examines the development of modern aerial vision and its role in refiguring subjectivity, space, and culture across a spectrum of visual expression during the interwar years.

His ongoing research projects include inquiries into the changing conceptualization of scale in American art and scientific imagery before and after "Big Science," the relationship between art and archaeological representation in the Americas, issues of camouflage in American culture during and after the World Wars and the intersection of art and liberal ideology during the New Deal.

Weems has received research fellowships from a range of institutions including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Hellman Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Air and Space Museum. His research has been published in leading journals of art history, American studies and the history of technology, as well as numerous anthologies and museum catalogs. Weems grew up on a dairy farm in Iowa.

This event is free and open to the public as supported by the Joy Pratt Markham Fund. Additional support is provided by the Department of Art.