Scenes from the Heartland
Book Feature - Scenes from the Heartland by Donna Baier Stein
Book Feature - Scenes from the Heartland by Donna Baier Stein
HBL Note: I just returned home from a few days in Kansas City where I got to visit Thomas Hart Benton’s home and studio. But I wanted to feature this book before I knew that I was going to have this opportunity. Being from the midwest, we hear a lot about Thomas Hart Benton’s work. My earliest memory is of his work in the Missouri State Capitol building - every child growing up in Jefferson City gets to tour the state capitol building at least once! More recently, there was some controversy surrounding the subject of the Thomas Hart Benton murals at Indiana University. This book would be great for anyone who is interested in or fans of his work.
Book Feature - Scenes from the Heartland by Donna Baier Stein
From the publisher:
When a contemporary writer turns her imagination loose inside the images of an iconic artist of the past, the result is storytelling magic at its best. Here are nine tales that bring to vivid life the early decades of the 20th century as witnessed by one of America's most well-known painters. Thomas Hart Benton sketched fiddlers and farm wives, preachers and soldiers, folks gathering in dance halls and tent meetings. Though his lithographs depict the past, the real-life people he portrayed face issues that are front and center today: corruption, women's rights, racial inequality.
In these stories we enter the imagined lives of Midwesterners in the late 1930s and early 1940s. A mysterious woman dancing to fiddle music makes one small gesture of kindness that helps heal the rift of racial tensions in her small town. A man leaves his childhood home after a tragic accident and becomes involved with the big-time gamblers who have made Hot Springs, Arkansas, their summer playground. After watching her mother being sent to an insane asylum simply for grieving over a miscarriage, a girl determines to never let any man have any say over her body.
Then as now, Americans have struggled with poverty, illness, and betrayal. These fictions reveal our fellow countrymen and women living with grace and strong leanings toward virtue, despite the troubles that face them.
