BMA : Exhibitions : 2005

All in a Day’s Work: Images of Farming and Ranching from the Collection of the Beach Museum of Art
30 August – 23 December 2005

From the 1920s through the 1960s, artists captured the agricultural heritage of Kansas and the surrounding region. This exhibition features works on paper -- prints, watercolors, and drawings -- depicting farming and ranching. Included are Regionalist artists Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood, as well as Kansas artists William Dickerson, John Helm, Herschel Logan, and E. Herbert Deines. Many of the artists were members of the Prairie Printmakers, and some were involved in the Works Progress Administration.


During the 1930s Kansas native John Steuart Curry, and fellow Regionalist artists Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, brought the Midwest region to the national forefront, with an emphasis on rural beauty, work ethic, and agriculture. Their idealized work was popular on the urban east coast, where it showed in stark contrast to the breadlines and unemployment of the Great Depression.

Other artists portrayed the region more realistically. Herschel Logan created hundreds of prints that captured 1930s Kansas, but included the reality of dust storms and tornados. Steven Dohanos and Joe Jones, in a more Social Realist style, depict how difficult the farming life was.

Of special interest are images that depict farm equipment from the 1920s and 1930s such as the complicated threshing rigs run by steam tractors and sorghum mills powered by horse or mule. Other works, such as those by William Dickerson and Mary Huntoon, reflect industrial growth and technological change in agriculture during the 1940s to 1960s.

To bring the exhibition to life, the labels include quotes by period writers such as William Allen White, artists such as photographer J. Wes Manigal, and farmers like Mil Penner and Lawrence Svobida, who lived during the period.

The exhibition is sponsored in part by the Kansas Arts Commission.

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