Marcia Wegman has been an 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.
THINGS sold all manner of items: If you wanted a waterbed, or more so, if you wanted to try out a waterbed, you crept up to the fifth floor of the new building that had been designed by architect, William Nowysz of the American Institute of Architects, and had a lie down. The only waterbed in Johnson County was covered in tie dye bed spreads and furry pillows. Above, on the poured cement ceiling, there were any number of black light posters.
Back in the day there was a fellow named Dean who worked at the store. He and his partner started making clothes. Then they had a whole line of clothes and a crazy name: Grace Bible & Banana Company. THINGS of course, sold their clothes from the fourth floor (nowadays, Grace Bible & Banana Co. pieces can be found on luxury vintage social media accounts). But what does this have to do with Wegner’s paintings? Just about everything. There was a jacket with long plaid sleeves that flared out in bells at the wrists. There was a whole other pattern and color when you turned up the cuffs. The vest was covered in black fabric that was quilted as thick as potholders. The pattern of the fabric was covered in bouquets of violets. Black and purple and blue and sometimes pink. The fabric resembled the violets in the greenhouse, variegated and tidy, yet higgly wiggly in a row. To put on that jacket was to be transformed into a drawing by Peter Max, or to fall into a small field of flowers, especially in winter when all of Iowa goes overcast and grey.
If you wanted a teddy bear made by the German-based toy company Stieff, you would find it on the third level. Same with a Sasha Doll, which were made in England and are now quite rare. If you wanted the bubbles made by European toy manufacturer Pustifix, you’d find them next to the greenhouse where shafts of light shot in from two stories above. Pustifix were the only soap bubbles that ever worked so prolifically well they were worth that extra fifty cents per container. How about that wind-up bird made of cellophane? You’d think it would fall apart, but actually, the one my brother possessed in 1970 is still intact today, in his toy collection.
The lowest level housed candy that had come from all over the world. On the wall of the delicatessen was a row of tin prints by Peter Blake, who had designed the album cover for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The tin prints repeated: Babe Rainbow, Babe Rainbow, Babe Rainbow. I wanted to be Babe Rainbow. I still want to be Babe Rainbow. Though that ship has sailed, one of those Babe Rainbows is with me to keep me company.
Outside, the THINGS & THINGS & THINGS building was a work in and of itself. 138 Clinton Street now houses the legally embroiled second location of the Field House, a long time Iowa City bar and dance club that used to be located on College Street.
The building won a design award from Iowa Architect as, “The one project among the entries that reaches out for additional architectural dimensions worth trying. The form is restrained and elegant; the activity it houses makes it … an architecture of involvement and action.”
As the entire block across the street was razed to build a shopping mall, temporary buildings were put up along the length of the block to house displaced businesses. The sidewalk was eventually doubled and the parking meters removed for a loading zone that was used by the neighboring flower shop.
Like Wegman herself, the store was a zeitgeist. It was always a zeitgeist in the most zietgiesty way. After the fire took out the corner stores at Clinton and College Streets, the Wegmans were able to purchase a couple of destroyed buildings. Then they hired William Nowysz, AIA, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan Architectural School. Together they came up with a plan that drew inspiration from the Design Research Building in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And then they drew on that great glass wish box that was the original Crate and Barrel Store in Chicago. The store was a big glass display case with the words THINGS THINGS THINGS welded to the frame of the building. These days one of the signs is in Marcia’s backyard where morning glories and clematis have taken it over as a trellis. Quietly, a slow motion still life, the flowers envelope each letter.
