Grant Wood (Part 2)

"This [utilization of of materials of our own American scene] is no mere chauvinism. If it is patriotic, it is so because a feeling for one's own milieu and for th validity of one's own life and its surroundings is patriotic. Certainly I prefer to think of it, not in terms of sentiment at all, but rather as a commonsense utilization for art of native materials -- an honest reliance by artist upoon subject matter which he can best interpret because he knows it best.
Because of this new emphasis on native materials, the artist no longer finds it necessary to migrate even to New york, or to seek any great metropolis. No longer is it necessary for him to suffer the confusing cosmopolitanism, the noise, the too intimate gregariousness of the large city. True, he may travel, he may observe, he may study in various environments, in order to develop his personality and achieve backgrounds and a perspective; but this need be little more than incidental to an educative process that centers in his home region.
The great central areas of America are coming to be evaluated more and more justly as the years pass. They are not Hinterland for New York; they are not barbaric."