How Pop Artist Jason Mecier Created Our Corny Cover

It started with a kernel of an idea.

For the cover of this special rural-themed issue of Iowa Magazine, we wanted a visual that popped. We wondered, what if we re-created one of Grant Wood’s most famous paintings using Iowa’s most famous crop?

Iowa Magazine art director Nick Beecher (03BA) took the corny concept to San Francisco-based pop artist Jason Mecier, who was all ears. Mecier is known for his audacious mosaics using candy, old electronics, and everything else that fills the junk drawers of his studio. He’s made portraits of Kevin Bacon from bacon and the Mona Lisa from candy wrappers.

For our cover story, we commissioned Mecier to create an homage to Wood’s iconic Stone City, Iowa using a variety of corn kernels found in the Hawkeye State and beyond. Wood created the pastoral in 1930—the same year he painted American Gothic—and it’s considered his first acclaimed landscape. Today, the regionalist painting—pictured on the back cover of this issue—is part of the permanent collection of the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska.

Stone City, a tiny eastern Iowa quarry town in Jones County, was where Wood helped establish an art colony in the summers of 1932 and 1933. The following year, Wood moved to Iowa City and joined the University of Iowa faculty.

Mecier used about 16,000 kernels of corn to create his homage, which he glued to a 28-by-36-inch backing board. His palette included 15 varieties of kernels, including Iowa’s signature yellow corn, an assortment of colorful heirloom seeds, and microwave popcorn. All told, Mecier spent 50 hours working on the piece before shipping it to Iowa City.

Mecier says replicating Wood’s masterpiece was a meditative exercise. “The painting already has great composition,” he says. “Working on it felt like I was mostly making different patterns of polka dots and stripes. I listened to a lot of ’70s folk rock like Gordon Lightfoot, Linda Ronstadt, and Buffy Sainte-Marie to keep myself in the right mood.”

Read more about the university’s continued work to fortify Wood’s legacy, and get a closer look at Mecier’s mosaic in our special “Rooted in Iowa” feature.

ART: JASON MECIER