In a recent visit to New York, I was excited to find paintings by my great-great uncle, John Steuart Curry, hanging in the modern section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was an odd Kansas boy who studied art in Paris and traveled with the Ringling Brothers Circus. While his paintings were quite popular at the national level, some of the folks back home had misgivings when he was invited to paint a series of murals on the interior of the Kansas Capitol building in Topeka. In fact, the objection to his themes (abolition, John Brown, tornados, looming cataclysm) was so intense that in protest, he refused to finish the murals and never signed his name. This statement by the Kansas Council of Women makes me particularly proud of Curry, a freak-friendly artist even back in the early 1900s. :p The murals do not portray the true Kansas. Rather than revealing a law-abiding progressive state, the artist has emphasized the freaks in its history - the tornadoes, and John Brown, who did not follow legal procedure. (As a strange side note, for most of my life Ive had dreams that look exactly like his tornado/storm paintings, though I never made the connection until today.)
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 15:42:21 +0000
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