Cedar Rapids, Iowa’s Brucemore, a National Trust Historic Site, is more than its stunning 26-acre, park-like setting and its 21-room historic mansion. While preservationists and school groups flock to the site, admiring its Queen Anne architecture, 1929 Skinner player pipe organ, and 1925 Grant Wood Sleeping Porch, its Artisan Studio has extended Brucemore’s mission.

Inspired by the legacy of the patrons of the arts who called Brucemore home, the Artisan Studio launched in 2019 as a vehicle for community connection. “Brucemore’s mission is to inspire the community through art, history, and preservation,” said Gerard Estella, the site’s artisan in residence. The Artisan Studio does that by offering one-on-one and small group engagement to help amplify the work of Iowa artists for Iowa audiences.

The Artisan Studio welcomes a handful of Iowa artists, about three-to-four annually, to participate in its Artisan Development Projects. These artists are offered professional connections and hands-on creative support in making new works. Those works are then exhibited, screened or performed on Brucemore’s grounds. Estella described how in a time when funding for emerging artists is increasingly scarce, this financial and organizational support can’t be overvalued.

Estella is an active participant in the Artisan Studio, helping the chosen artists in editing film and producing music amongst many things. He’s also helping to develop the Studio’s many initiatives. The projects supported by the Artisan Studio run the gamut. There’s a digital series, including works which can be found on YouTube, programming about history and gardening, and live events encompassing dance, music, and spoken word.

Digital Series

One of the remarkable aspects of the Artisan Studio’s efforts is their reach. While the program highlights all cultural things in Iowa, the digital content is available through YouTube, so people anywhere can access it.

The digital content includes three different series created with the expertise of Brucemore’s team. Nooks and Crannies of History shares the stories of little-known people and events of the past, including Iowa women’s six-on six basketball, the history of Christmas cards, and the story of one Titanic survivor.

A Day in the Life of a Garden is presented by David Morton, Brucemore’s curator of landscape, with occasional appearances from other members of the Brucemore facilities team. They offer gardening tips for anyone who wants to take on a DIY project and sneak peaks into how the Brucemore gardens and landscape are preserved and maintained. Behind-the-scenes information offers a glimpse at Morton’s winter vision board, where he reveals how he plans color for the season.

Live From the Artisan Studio at Brucemore features digital episodes of performances recorded at Brucemore in front of a live studio audience, plus candid interviews with the performers. These are intimate conversations with artists, along with an acoustic performance. In the year ahead, the series will expand genres represented to increase opportunities for various artists.

In 2024, the Artisan Studio also included a cohort of three artists whose work was then made available to the public through showcases at the historic site:

From Iowa and Back: The Vietnam Era Film

As Jeremy Glazier’s father was getting older and losing his memory, Glazier realized he was running out of time to learn and document his father’s stories of serving in the military during the Vietnam era and felt an urgency to do so. “Their generation is often put on the back burner. The guys who fought in that era didn’t get as much recognition as they should.”

Glazier has worked as photographer, writer, and podcaster as well as documentarian. His project quickly grew from talking to his own father to friends’ fathers to people each veteran introduced. He talked to them about what it was like to serve both in Vietnam and in the period, but also what it was like to come back to the U.S.

Glazier “always tends to think locally first,” and given his father’s own experience growing up in small towns across Iowa, he focused the documentary on other Iowa veterans.

A father of four himself, Glazier had been to Brucemore often on school field trips and other outings. He knew a few musicians and others who had been aided by Brucemore’s initiatives to foster community connection, but didn’t know the depth of the Artisan Studio program until he was recommended by a cousin. Being part of the Artisan Studio program was invaluable to completing From Iowa and Back: The Vietnam Era film, he says.

“The struggles of being an independent artist are time and resources. If I had to do this on my own, it would take me years to get it done,” Glazier said.

The Artisan Studio’s help in cutting and editing the personal documentary, finding musicians to compose original scores, providing a place for interviews, giving guidance on entering festival and developing a distribution plan, and other support helped in countless ways. The feature-length film premiered at Brucemore in March 2025 and the 11-minute short film version already has been accepted to several film festivals, winning two awards to date. Plans for the distribution of the full-length film have yet to be announced. His father’s face is featured on the poster for the film.

Glazier sees the Artisan Studio as continuing the legacy of the Douglases and the Halls, residents of Brucemore, who supported Grant Wood and other Midwest artists.

Jennifer Beall, Brucemore’s events and communications coordinator, said From Iowa and Back is an example of the ways in which projects from Artisan Studio can go beyond the walls of Brucemore.

Singer-Songwriter Marcy Each

Marcy Each went to Nashville to record her first album. But her most recent album is being recorded and produced closer to home at Brucemore, with Estella working as one of its producers. Several of her original songs from the new album were performed for an audience sitting under the stars on Brucemore’s Artisan Studio lawn, backed by the Brucemore band . The full album will be released in summer 2025 and will be available on most streaming platforms.

“Working with Brucemore's Artisan Studio has helped me grow both as an artist and a songwriter,” Each said. “Because this opportunity allowed me to have more time in the studio with gifted musicians, I was able to be creative and take risks both in the types of songs I was writing and the way I interpreted and sang them. Compared with my previous work, this project took me out of my sweet and simple comfort zone of acoustic guitars and soothing vocals and challenged me to explore pain and grit in both my writing and singing voice.”

Everything/Something/Nothing

Playwright Brigid Martin used her year as part of the Artisan Studio to write Everything/Something/Nothing, a play featuring the characters of Dionysus and Athena. The title comes from a quote from Euripides, and the play, while based in Greek mythology, is set in the present day and explores what it means to be successful in life.

Everything/Something/Nothing was mounted as a staged reading in Brucemore’s carriage house which houses an event and film set in March 2025, the culmination of her year . Part of the reason she wanted to participate in the Artisan Studio was because of the opportunity to work with Estella and because of his experience with musical theater, something Martin wants to do more of. (This show was not a musical, but was scored live, like a movie, and had a musical element.) The playwright has had 18 pieces mounted in the Iowa City market and thus has connections of her own; she believes the introductions Brucemore and the Artisan Studio made will help her not only mount Everything/Something/Nothing as a full production, but also open doors for her for other works. It’s a small, intimate show, she says, and that makes it a good fit for the smaller theaters in the area.