Born Nov. 14, 1897, Dunavant, Kansas
Died Aug. 29, 1946, Madison, Wisconsin.

Curry studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Art Institute School in Chicago, at Geneva College in Pennsylvania and in Paris. His first exhibit was in 1924 at the National Academy of Design. He also worked as an illustrator for magazines. His style is American regional, invoking the State of his birth and the background of simple life, but he could present those scenes in a way matched by few others. Only someone growing up in the rural Midwest or West could make so realistic a scene such as Coyotes Stealing a Pig, or his most famous great plains storm painting, (also made as a lithograph), The Line Storm. Tours taken with the Barnum and Bailey Circus provided another venue to express in print. Note the work The Missed Leap.

In the so called “American Scene” prints he is in the good company of Benton, Wood and a few others. Like them, he painted what he was familiar with. Some realists produced work emphasizing commerce and the machine, others social justice, others landscape and the rural community. Curry was said to have allowed for all visions except those professed by the radical artists. But if he didn’t include social radicalism in his images it cannot be said he did not espouse social causes. He was part of the 1935 New York exposition “Art Commentary on Lynching” which was still a major dilemma in America in the 1930’s. His prints The Fugitive and Manhood are examples from this. A number of prints deal with Black culture in rural America, both the sedate and the violent moments.

His work was in the first set of prints offered by Associated American Artists in 1934. He was selected to do a mural projects at the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka (1937), in Washington D.C. at Interior and Justice and in the law library at the University of Wisconsin. The Topeka murals resulted in a great disillusionment to Curry, causing him to leave the State and never return. Because of some of the Kansas subject matter he chose to illustrate, in particular, the John Brown mural, the Kansas Legislature in 1941 refused to let him continue with the remainder of his planned murals. He finished what was in process but refused to sign them. Some people who knew him speculate that this event may have helped cause his early death. In 1992, the Kansas Legislature issued an official apology for the way in which Curry was treated in 1941.

He was never really a teacher, but in 1936 he went to Madison, Wisconsin to the University of Wisconsin’s College of Agriculture with an appointment as the resident artist, a position for which he did not have to teach. He died of a heart attack while in that position at age 48. Curry ‘s boyhood home has been moved to the Jefferson County, Kansas Historical Society in Oskaloosa, Kansas and renovated into a gallery to display his work.

A key reference on Curry’s prints is The Lithographs of John Steuart Curry, 1976, by Sylvan Cole. There were 41 known lithographs at the time of the book. Two others have appeared since, a first stone version of John Brown and a larger image size version of Kansas Wheat Ranch.