John Steuart Curry

John Steuart Curry earned a place of prominence as one of the great American Regionalist painters of the 1930s alongside Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. These artists often depicted rural subject matter and everyday scenes from the Midwest through a nostalgic lens. Curry’s home state of Kansas inspired many of his compositions, which celebrate a spirit of independence and resilience in the American heartland.

Born on November 14, 1897, in Dunavant, Kansas, Curry studied art as a youth, and in 1916, enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute. Shortly afterward, he transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After several years producing commercial illustrations on the East Coast, Curry left for Paris in 1926, where he studied drawing and viewed works by Old Masters at the Louvre. Upon returning to the United States, Curry taught at the Cooper Union and the Art Students League in New York. During the 1930s, the Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned Curry to paint murals for the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior buildings in Washington, DC. In 1936, Curry undertook an artist residency at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he remained until his death at the age of 48.