Women’s Voices for Change reviews Scenes from the Heartland

Three years ago, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, hosted the first major exhibition of Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) in more than two decades. Specifically, it explored the connection between his work and Hollywood. The curators argued that Benton’s brief tenure in the silent film industry had given him an appreciation for storytelling that informed all of his work.

The exhibition, which went on to tour museums in Kansas City, Missouri; Fort Worth, Texas; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was organized by Benton’s diverse output, from colorful murals of 1920s Hollywood, to horrifying World War II propaganda posters, to book illustrations like his famous depiction of the Joad family for The Grapes of Wrath.

Toward the end of the exhibit were a number of his lithographs, quiet and humble compared with his vivid murals and posters of monstrous Japanese giants devouring Allied soldiers. The lithographs captured poignant, isolated moments in agricultural and small town America. They made art of the commonplace: farms and families, train stations and meeting houses.

These painterly snapshots were the inspiration for a new collection of short stories by award-winning author Donna Baier Stein.

For Scenes from the Heartland, Baier Stein selects nine of Benton’s lithographs and, starting with what the artist chose to depict, weaves an intricate tapestry of mothers, sons, fathers, and daughters, people struggling against any number of odds in the Midwest of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.