Lloyd flips for Gothic coin design

Patrick Lloyd, who has about 700 American Gothic collectibles, met artist Grant Wood's sister—who was the model for the woman in the painting—and corresponded with her for two years in the late 1980s before her death. Photo by Tom Jorgensen.

Patrick Lloyd has ties, cuff links, clocks, calendars, candy tins, T-shirts, wine bottles, ice cream cartons, artwork, puzzles, plates, Christmas cards, socks, and porcelain statues. He also has enough correspondence, newspaper clippings, and magazine articles to fill four mammoth three-ring binders.

He has about 700 objects altogether, all having something to do with what may be Iowa’s most famous painting.

You know the one: a man, a woman, a pitchfork, and a white house. It’s a painting that has been praised by the masses, put on a commemorative Iowa license plate, printed on a U.S. postage stamp, and parodied by everyone from Miss Piggy to Paul Newman to Playboy magazine.

Lloyd, associate professor and chair of family dentistry, is informally lobbying to have Grant Wood’s American Gothic celebrated one more time, in a way that could place it in everyone’s pockets by 2004.

He wants it to be the official design on the Iowa quarter.

“It’s an opportunity to reflect on the history of the state. Grant Wood is one of our celebrated painters, and it’s one of the most recognized paintings in the world. There’s something about it that reaches back in time and makes a connection to us today,” he says. “But it’s also a misunderstood painting, and few people outside Iowa even know where it’s from or what it’s about. Choosing this image for the quarter will cause people to pause for a moment, ask questions, and find out more about Iowa.”

Lloyd, who grew up in Wisconsin, didn’t even live in Iowa when the painting first struck his fancy in 1982, after reading an article about it in Smithsonian magazine.

He discovered that Wood, a renowned artist of the American Regionalism movement who was a UI faculty member from 1934 to 1941, won a $300 prize for the painting in 1930 from the Art Institute of Chicago, where it now resides. The woman in the painting was actually Wood’s sister, Nan. He also learned two other important, little-known facts.

First, Wood intended the man and woman in the painting to be a father and his spinster daughter, not husband and wife. Second, and perhaps most intriguing to Lloyd, the man who posed for the painting—Byron McKeeby—was Wood’s Cedar Rapids dentist who graduated from the UI College of Dentistry in 1894.

“I think maybe I was destined to move to Iowa and work here,” says Lloyd, who came to Iowa City in 1996 from Marquette University School of Dentistry, where he had been director of the clinic for adults with disabilities.

Lloyd’s passion for all things Gothic spills over to his profession. As a dental specialist with an interest in treating the geriatric patient, he often uses the painting to make a point in his lectures that “caring for older adults is like viewing the American Gothic—both are more complicated than they first appear.”

Several years ago, for an art exhibit in Cedar Rapids titled Overalls All Over that reverently parodied the Wood classic, Lloyd and colleagues at the college painted and dressed sculptures of the Gothic characters to look like a dentist and his hygienist.

Also, Lloyd has a large, framed counted cross-stitch of the painting hanging in his office. He bought the pattern in 1999, and Jamie Sharp, the college’s coordinator of continuing education, volunteered to stitch it. Two years and about 100,000 stitches later, she completed it.

“As an avid stitcher, I enjoy stitching for someone who will appreciate the effort. I knew he would. Everyone around here knows about his collection,” she says. “I think American Gothic would make a great quarter. And I stitched Byron for two years; he seems like an old friend now.”

Not everyone agrees that American Gothic would best represent the state. Lloyd has fielded complaints from people who believe the painting perpetuates negative stereotypes.

Lloyd worries that American Gothic may be excluded because of a U.S. Mint rule that the designs must not feature the bust of a person, living or dead. Some might interpret the Wood painting as a type of portrait, Lloyd says; however, that was never Grant’s intent.

Also, there are four other designs in the running: two other Wood paintings, Beautiful Land and Foundation in Education; a depiction of the Sullivan Brothers of Waterloo who all died while serving on a Navy ship together in World War II; and one titled Feeding the World, which includes drawings of a pig, a cow, and corn.

Last year, a committee of Iowans chose the five and sent them to the U.S. Mint to ensure all were appropriate to put on a coin. Gov. Tom Vilsack will get the final say later this year. The Iowa quarter is scheduled to be minted in December 2004.

In the meantime, Lloyd will tool around town in his car with the personalized “GOTHC” license plate and offer his opinions about why American Gothic should win—for what it’s worth, he says.

That’d be about 25 cents.

Article by Amy Schoon