Description

This year the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art (CRMA) with celebrate its 125 th anniversary with a full program of exhibitions directly related to and featuring the development and strengths of its permanent collection. The proposed grant would support three of the exhibitions, which are drawn directly from the permanent holdings. The year-long slate of sequential exhibitions will allow CRMA to place on view a significant number of collection works in the context of the span of the collection as a whole and in the more limited but equally mission-central context of the life and career of Grant Wood.
“125! 125 Masterworks from the Collection” will feature some of the finest works in a wide range of media, from American Impressionist canvases to paintings by Ben Shahn and Philip Pearlstein, as well as sculpture, and works in ceramics and glass.  “Grant Wood Revealed: Rare Works by an American Master” will celebrate Iowa’s greatest artist with selections from CRMA’s holdings of close to 300 works by Wood—the largest single collection of his art. The exhibition will include well-known paintings that are often on view, as well as a wide range of rarely-seen early drawings, metalwork, and formative paintings. “Americans in Paris: Grant Wood and Marvin Cone’s 1920 Trip to Paris” will assemble the works that the two artist-friends produced on their formative sojourn in France, and will share Cone’s meticulous diary of their tour and experiences 100 years ago.
Given that CRMA customarily devotes its gallery spaces to the artists and works that most visitors come to see–there are dedicated galleries for paintings by Wood, Cone, and Mauricio Lasansky (another local celebrity artist)—these three collection-based exhibition projects will share a dramatically broader range of the CRMA’s holdings. A concerted effort will be made to create related programming and to market the entire anniversary year to the museum’s significant annual audience of over 30,000 visitors. Over 50 public programs and events are already scheduled for the first third of the  year.
CRMA has conceived a fitting celebration of the museum’s history and the growth of its signature collections, which will be central to the program of exhibitions and events. The project allows the APP to continue its encouragement and support of collection-based exhibitions presented as unique and notable events. This is the first grant to CRMA in ten years, and the first in 15 years to address an art-based project rather than relief funding, which included a 2008 grant for recovery after major regional floods.