by: Amanda Bird

Abstract:

This study analyzes attempts to make rural people visible in the art of Grant Wood, Russell Lee, and John Steinbeck. Wood achieved this by painting pastorals that arrest the rural Iowan landscape in a time before the changes of corporate agriculture and the devastation of the Dust Bowl transformed rural space. Lee's photography in Pie Town, New Mexico confronted the notion that the rural poor lacked dignity or humanity by constructing a vision of community. Steinbeck argued with The Grapes of Wrath for the salt of the earth farmer, the victim of economic oppression in California. The hope suggested by the work of these artists contradicts the narrative of Western history: the growth of agri-business and the deterioration of small towns and economies left rural folk increasingly isolated by the 1930s. The representations of rural folk and farmers by Lee, Wood, and Steinbeck do not reflect the paradigmatic shifts of economy and culture that took place in the early 20th century.