Lauren Kroiz's new book, Cultivating Citizens, covers territory already known about the politics of the three leading regionalists Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, but does so from a different vantage point – that of pedagogy and public engagement. Usually these artists are described because of their opposition to the modernism defended by Stuart Davis and Marxist art historian Meyer Shapiro. Instead the author uses pedagogy to illustrate how Benton, Curry and Wood defined “art” differently from their colleagues – believing it to be created by all of the people, rather than the province of the professional artists, upper classes or elitist museums. Using the teaching methods of each painter, she shows how they engaged students, the public, and other professional artists. While teaching at Stone City and later at the University of Iowa, Wood practiced a populist form of teaching that assured students that they would learn by doing. Without emphasis on studying art-historical models, most of Wood's students’ works looked very much like his paintings. Wood came into conflict with fellow Iowa faculty members Lester Longman, who believed in both technical and cultural knowledge of art, and H. W. Janson, who placed emphasis on iconology and interpretation, saying that art comes from art. Both views were at odds with Wood's egocentric teaching methods.

Kroiz shows that Benton wanted contemporary art not to be the leading edge of society, but the reflection of shared cultural values understood by all. He believed that an artist's success could be measured by his sales in the marketplace. He, too, believed in learning by doing, but referenced art-historical models. Benton's vitriolic and homophobic attacks on both European modernists and American art museums are well known. He thought museums useless for teaching because the art there was “dead.” Using this material the author tells a fascinating story of the birth and growth of the Nelson–Atkins Museum after 1933. Paul Gardner, the director, a graduate of Paul Sachs's museum course at Harvard, made the Kansas City museum a model for American museums throughout the country through his programs of education outreach. Bringing the public into the museum to see masterpieces required public education, an expensive proposition during the Depression. Gardner instituted a core of docents to teach about the art. In so doing, Kroiz points out that American museums became feminized because unpaid docents who did most of the educational work were women who taught children. This gendering of the museum and Benton's attacks on limp-wristed curators made museums un-masculine and thus un-American for the regionalists. Benton's attacks eventually got him fired from teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Curry's amateurism compromised the quality and appreciation of his work, but he succeeded in teaching Wisconsin farmers how to paint while a visiting artist at the University of Wisconsin. Consequently he angered both Stuart Davis (president of the Artists Union) and Benton, who found Curry's talent lacking, even though his work was arresting to his admirers and he was liked for his humility.

Placing the late careers of Benton, Wood and Curry into their institutional educational contexts, Kroiz shows the importance of regionalism for public outreach, and the rejection of such populism a decade later. As artists and museums became increasingly professionalized, she asks whether the regionalists’ populism, under the guise of education, was for the public good, or whether it was linked to conservative politics and ultimately to fascism. While critics linked it to fascism, ironically, perhaps the outreach of the regionalists helped to put art appreciation in the path of such totalitarianism. The idea that art and education contribute to democratic society is one still valuable today. Kroiz asks, but wisely does not answer, what the meaning and purpose are of a “national” art, and how art functions in a cultural democracy, then and now.