At the Sioux City Art Center in western Iowa, the curator Christopher Atkins pointed to a new discovery in a painting capturing an autumnal Midwest scene: A suggested path through rows of corn shocks leading to a little barn on the horizon, painted in faded pink beneath a barely blue sky.
The painting is one of seven panels of the 1926 “Corn Room” mural by Grant Wood that once lined the dining room walls of the historical Martin Hotel in Sioux City. Until recently, the painting’s details — the path, the barn, the pinks and blues — were muddied in a sepia haze from an aging protective layer of varnish applied decades ago.
“It was harder to see some of the atmospheric effects he was doing with shadows, horizon, clouds and sky,” Atkins said.
The art center last year sent the mural for cleaning and conservation to the Midwest Art Conservation Center in Minneapolis, in anticipation of the work’s 2026 centennial. Since 2007, the mural had been on view in a small gallery tucked away on the third floor, but now it will be permanently displayed as a centerpiece on the ground floor.
“The restoration has been a step in transitioning the mural from artifact to art,” said Todd Behrens, the Sioux City Art Center’s director.
The newly restored mural will also anchor the art center’s upcoming exhibition marking the centennial, “Pasture to Present: Grant Wood’s Corn Room and New Visions of Rural America,” which runs June 13 to Dec. 6. Six of the seven original panels (one was long ago lost to wear and tear) will be featured, alongside the work of contemporary artists depicting the rural Midwest today.
“It’s a big, monumental piece of artwork,” Atkins said. “It says a lot about Sioux City and about our history. It’s a chance to look back at 100 years of where we are as a community through this artwork.”
Wood painted the “Corn Room” mural with the help of one of his assistants, the artist Edgar Britton, four years before he made one of the most famous works in the nation’s art history, “American Gothic,” his stark portrait of a fictional Midwestern farmer and his daughter.
Unlike that painting, which has a distinct crispness, the mural has an Impressionistic and immersive quality, like walking into an Iowa cornfield from someone’s dream a century ago — or perhaps a Midwesterner’s response to the haystacks series painted by Claude Monet in France some three decades earlier.
The mural’s story is one of discovery. The Omaha hotel magnate Eugene C. Eppley commissioned Wood to do murals for the Martin Hotel, and two similar murals for his other Iowa hotels. One is on view at the Hoff Family Arts & Culture Center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art has the remnants of the other, as well as a corn cob chandelier by Wood that hung alongside it, in its collection.
Wood, not Eppley, chose the corn motif. The artist “wanted to make damn sure that everybody who stayed in this hotel, ate in this dining room, was aware of where they were,” Behrens said.
By the mid-1950s, Eppley had sold his properties to the Sheraton Corporation, and over time the mural at the Martin Hotel was painted and wallpapered over, only to be rediscovered in 1979 and eventually gifted to the Sioux City Art Center in the 1990s.
Wanda Corn, a leading Grant Wood scholar, said these murals signified an important transition for Wood, from experimenting with Eurocentric Impressionism to becoming a leading figure of Regionalism, a modern realist art movement of the 1930s that prioritized the Midwest as a place worthy of depiction.
“He’s making this slow turn towards a more Iowa-based vocabulary,” Corn said.
When Wood started the murals in 1926, he had just returned from a stint in Paris, where he had a small exhibition that did not generate much interest, Corn said, perhaps marking the beginning of what she called his “disillusionment” with urbanity.
Key to this turn was his mentorship with the Iowa poet Jay G. Sigmund, a Regionalist literary figure who drew inspiration from his own corner of Iowa, the Wapsipinicon River Valley, and who wrote several poems about the land and even one about Wood himself.
Sigmund scolded Wood about spending so much time painting European landscapes “when he could be doing native material in Iowa,” Corn said.
Corn was very important to Sigmund, she added: “He liked a great deal about the crop.”
It was during this moment in Wood’s life that Eppley commissioned the “Corn Room” murals. A few years later, Wood’s commitment to painting his environment was complete, as captured in a ghostwritten 1935 essay, “Revolt Against the City.”
“He basically proselytized for Midwestern artists painting the Midwest and becoming local artists,” Corn said.
The murals offer a deeper understanding of Wood, an enigmatic artist whose agricultural landscapes and rural portraits have been interpreted as celebratory, satirical, nationalistic and even as expressions of his somewhat closeted queerness.
For Matthew Fluharty, a writer and curator who grew up on a family farm in Ohio, the murals represent a form of agrarian life that is no longer widespread as industrial agricultural practices have become common.
“They are portals through which we can understand the dynamic and complex forms of change that have always been present in the lands and cultures and economies of the Midwest,” said Fluharty, who is the founder and executive director of Art of the Rural, a nonprofit organization that supports artists working in rural and non-urban settings. For him, the “Corn Room” murals are more important than “American Gothic” ever was.
“I would hold them as absolutely one of the really important pivot points of the history of non-urban artwork in the United States,” Fluharty said. “The story of their disappearance and re-emergence feels really closely linked to how we think about the challenges and also the resilience of the rural Midwest.”
While “American Gothic” has “an afterlife of urban extraction,” Fluharty said — referring to its current residence in a major metropolis at the Art Institute of Chicago — the murals remain tethered to the place they were made.
“A number of the pieces that we hold as being significant Grant Wood pieces are themselves nowhere near the region that inspired them,” Fluharty said. But the “Corn Room” murals are, and, he said, “I think that’s really profoundly significant.”
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