Cultivating Citizens with Art in Wisconsin

Prof. Lauren Kroiz (University of California, Berkeley) discusses the Wisconsin origins of her new book, Cultivating Citizens: The Regional Work of Art in the New Deal Era. Her lecture centers on the University of Wisconsin’s Rural Art Program, which began at UW’s College of Agriculture in the late 1930s and continues into the present. She considers the contributions of Regionalist painter John Steuart Curry, rural sociologist John Rector Barton, art history professor Oskar Hagen, and rural arti