• Curry gained national attention as a painter of Kansas scenes and became associated with the so-called Regionalist movement including Grant Wood of Iowa and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. He lived outside of Kansas for much of his career in the Northeast and Wisconsin.

• The artist may be best known for the murals he created for the State Capitol Building in Topeka, Kansas, especially his controversial work Tragic Prelude featuring the abolitionist John Brown.

• As a boy, Curry rode on horseback to private art lessons. His teacher encouraged him to draw the animals and buildings on his family’s farm outside of Dunavant, Kansas.

• After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago between 1916 and 1918, Curry decided he wanted to become an illustrator. He moved to New Jersey to work with established illustrator Harvey Dunn, a fellow Midwesterner. Dunn helped Curry gain commissions producing art for serialized stories in magazines such as Boy’s Life and Country Gentleman.

• Curry ended his life working as a visiting artist in the agricultural school of the University of Wisconsin. The school provided him a studio and students and faculty came to see him paint and hear him talk about his work. From a biography in The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1944:

"John Steuart Curry was born on a farm near Dunavant, Kansas, forty seven years ago. He studied here and abroad and finally settled in Connecticut, but not for long. He spent a year folling the Ringling Brothers Circus on its tour around the country, and many of his brilliant canvases from this period are now owned by leading museums and private collectors. Later, Curry was invited to depict the history of Kansas in murals on the State Capitol building, and his theme and conception - a gigantic, fiery John Brown as the central figure - created a nation-wide sensation. He also painted the Oklahoma Land Rush in murals for the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior in their new buildings in Washington. Curry's canvases show a great variety of subjects, ranging from Kansas tornadoes and Mississippi floods to farm animals and rural baptismal rites, but all of them are the blood and sinews of America. Since 1936, John Steuart Curry has been painting and teaching at the University of Wisconsin, as the University's first Artist in Residence. In the winter of 1943 he took a brief leave of absence to record, at first hand, the activites of the Medical Corps at Camp Barkley, Texas, and his work is now a part of the Abbott collection of Army Medical Paintings. His illustrations for My Friend Flicka and Thunderhead are outstanding; he has also done illustrations for a special edition of Leaves of Grass and his now working on the Divine Comedy"