Grant Wood and the Carriage House on Turner Alley

On a narrow lane just southeast of downtown Cedar Rapids, tucked behind a former mortuary, stands a converted carriage house that once served as one of the most consequential art studios in American history. This is five Turner Alley, where Grant Wood lived and worked for eleven years, and where, in nineteen thirty, he painted American Gothic. Wood had grown up nearby, born in eighteen ninety-one outside Anamosa and transplanted to Cedar Rapids at age ten after his father's death.

He studied art in Chicago and Paris, traveled through Germany and the Netherlands, and came home convinced that the correct subject matter for American painting was here, in the rolling hills of Iowa, in the faces of its farmers, in the pitched rooflines of small-town houses. He moved into the carriage house in nineteen twenty-four, living in the hayloft behind the Turner Mortuary. In the converted hayloft above, he painted for the next eleven years.

Woman with Plants, Daughters of the Revolution, the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, Dinner for Threshers. And American Gothic, which he painted after a drive through southern Iowa when he spotted a small Carpenter Gothic farmhouse in Eldon and is said to have sketched it on the back of an envelope. His sister Nan and the family dentist, Byron McKeeby, posed as the figures.

He called them father and daughter; much of Iowa called the painting an insult. The painting won a bronze medal at the Art Institute of Chicago and was purchased for the permanent collection. Cedar Rapids found itself famous for a painting it initially resented, by an artist who had been living above a mortuary and painting in borrowed light.

Wood left Cedar Rapids in nineteen thirty-five for a faculty position at the University of Iowa, where he died in nineteen forty-two.