American artist Grant Wood was BOTD in 1891. Born in Anamosa in rural Iowa, he was raised in Cedar Rapids, before attending the Handicraft Guild in Minneapolis and the School of the Arts Institute in Chicago. He joined the Army during World War One, working as an artist designing camouflage scenes, and became an art teacher after the war. After extensive travel through Europe in the 1920s, he returned to America, establishing the Stone City Art Colony in Iowa to assist artists throughout the Great Depression. He became a leading exponent of Regionalism in American art. He became famous for American Gothic, an austere portrait of his sister Nan and the family dentist Dr. Byron McKeeby. First exhibited in Chicago in 1930, it became a national sensation, propelling Wood to celebrity. Now an iconic image of Americana, it has been interpreted variously as a critique of small-town conservatism and a testament to the Mid-West pioneer spirit. Wood worked in a variety of media including stained glass, ceramics, metal, wood and lithography. Gay and closeted, he was briefly and disastrously married to Sara Sherman Maxon in the 1930s. Homoerotic imagery and symbols punctuated much of his work. In 1939, the Post Office refused to distribute his lithograph of a naked man bathing, declaring it pornographic. In response, Wood cropped the nude figure out of the image. He died of cancer in 1942, aged 50.