The University of Iowa will celebrate Iowa's most famous artist and faculty member, Grant Wood, with the Grant Wood Biennial Symposium, Grant Wood Today, April 13 and 14 in Art Building West and the Black Box Theater of the Iowa Memorial Union. A full schedule of the free symposium is available online.

Wood, who was born near Anamosa and raised partly in Cedar Rapids, made the terrain of his childhood one of the most recognizable landscapes in American art, and his American Gothic competes with the Mona Lisa for history's most-parodied painting. It has achieved an iconic status attained by only a handful of artistic works.

He taught in the UI School of Art and Art History from 1934 to 1941, and died of pancreatic cancer in 1941 at the UI Hospital. A Grant Wood Colony — reflecting the Stone City Colony he founded in 1932, is being developed at the UI.