Marcia Wegman has been in the Iowa City zeitgeist since arriving here in 1957 to study printmaking with Mauricio Lasansky at the University of Iowa. Now at the age of 90, Marcia is presenting what she is calling her final show, one that also serves as an homage to her time running a beloved retail store in the heart of Iowa City. Opening on Friday, July 3 at the Iowa Artisan’s Gallery, Wegman’s “Things & Things & Things” exhibition will run through July 30.
Wegman is well known for her Iowa landscape paintings and drawings, often rendered in oil pastel. But long before her paintings and prolific career as an artist, Wegman ran a retail store called THINGS & THINGS & THINGS in the Hub of Iowa City. Located at 130 South Clinton Street, it opened before Urban Renewal pinched off traffic, giving downtown its Pedestrian Mall. It survived the great fire of January 1970 that destroyed the entire North East corner of Clinton and College Streets. Luckily, the Wegmans were able to buy property destroyed in the fire and rebuild a five floor show case of a commercial building. Wegman ran the business with her family and a unique set of friends in that perfect era before the internet, corporate big-box stores and windowless shopping malls pushed so many similar small businesses out of existence.
In a social media post shared by the Iowa Artisans Gallery, Wegman gave one explanation for the title of the show, stating that “…many of the floral still lives have little objects I have acquired over the years.” But, as the replies fondly recalling her store pointed out, this final show is also Wegman’s nod to THINGS & THINGS & THINGS and the delight that the ephemera from such a business can bestow upon a community. From the early 1960s until 1996 when they decided to close, what exactly did the store have? Lots of things, never too many things. Exquisite things that you just love to pause and look at. And likewise, in Wegman’s recent works, many are sprinkled with the small treasures one might have purchased at the store. In “Narcissus with Beaded Goat,” a still life of three daffodils in a stone vase, there is a beaded goat no bigger than your fist. The goat was brought to Wegman from Africa by the daughter of a close friend. It sits in the center of a coffee table in her home and has been admired by many a visitor over the years.
The small goat is so loved, she appeared in a previous painting of tulips in “Painting in Pairs,” Wegner’s solo exhibition in Cedar Rapids’ Gilded Pear Gallery in December of 2025.
Another small composition involves a line of small treasures sitting on the upper windowsill, two Native American fetishes appear to be gazing outside, taking in the fall woods. One of the two, a bright turquoise rabbit, is the only dot of blue in the composition. Facing them is a turtle who looks as though he is performing a duet with the window latch. Yes—the window latch. The two items are drawn in their permanent duet. Is the latch a turtle? Or is he a latch? Who cares! I say. Love is love! Turtle and Latch, together at last. The two of them are benevolently watched over by a ceramic baby bird, of the gigantic variety. That bird is the kind your grandmother might have given you, or something someone would have found at THINGS & THINGS & THINGS.
Marcia met her husband, Tom, in 1958 when they both were MFA candidates in art school at the University of Iowa. To help support themselves they took up selling antiques to other art students from their third-floor apartment on Washington Street that looked over the south side of the Pentacrest. The hefting around of furniture morphed into selling things at street fairs in Chicago. Then they opened their store, thinking they would keep it going while Tom finished his MFA. Once they had their degrees in hand, they imagined that they would close up shop and become art teachers. But the life of the store had other ideas. It became a place that attracted people with unusual and artistic talents…