The Friends of American Art at the Art Institute paid $300 for “American Gothic”--a nice investment, as it turned out. Grant Wood also took home a bronze medal, a $300 prize and sudden fame.

His famous 1942 parody of Grant Wood's iconic "American Gothic" replaces the white Midwestern man and woman with Ella Watson, a Black woman who worked as a cleaner at the Farm Security Administration.

American Gothicism: in the U.S., we’ve carved out our own mode of the Gothic, and it’s pretty creepy.

Peter Schjeldahl on the Whitney’s retrospective of Grant Wood, the mid-century Iowan painter who made occasionally impressive, predominantly weird, sometimes awful art.