Stone City and the Summer Colony

Roughly fifteen miles northeast of Cedar Rapids, along a limestone bluff above the Wapsipinicon River, lies the small village of Stone City. In the summers of nineteen thirty-two and nineteen thirty-three, it became one of the most concentrated artistic communities in the country, born out of Grant Wood's belief that American art needed to leave the city and go home to the land. Wood co-founded the Stone City Art Colony on the estate of John A.

Green, a limestone quarry magnate whose industry had given the village its name and then abandoned it. The timing was deliberate. The Depression had made formal art education inaccessible to most young Midwestern artists, and Wood argued that talent did not require New York or Paris, only instruction, community, and proximity to the landscape that was the actual subject of American painting.

Students and faculty lived in the abandoned limestone buildings of the estate and camped in antique horse-drawn ice wagons, borrowed from a Cedar Rapids ice company, that were painted in bright colors and hauled to the site. The faculty included, alongside Wood, Adrian Dornbush, Edward Rowan, and Marvin Cone. Wood himself was a central figure in American Regionalism, a movement that insisted the American heartland was not the cultural margin but the cultural core.

The colony ran only two summers. Depression finances made a third impossible, and the assets were eventually sold to cover debts. Faculty had taught without pay.

But the photographs survive, and the idea behind Stone City, that the Midwest deserved its own art school on its own terms, outlasted the wagons.