52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 2 – A Record Records That Adds Add Color
Prompt: Our ancestors were more than names and dates. This week, tell about a record that added color or context to an ancestor’s life. What did it tell you about that person that made them feel more “alive”? Or maybe you found something literally colorful, like a painting.
For this week’s assignment, instead of a single record that adds color, I’ve instead chosen a whole body of artistic work—records of creative expression—by painter John Steuart Curry (1897-1946).
Curry was born in Jefferson County, Kansas, as was I. He is a 2nd cousin 2X removed.
Although he left rural Kansas to study art in Chicago, New York, and Paris, his work mostly centered around the Kansas plains from which he came. Curry, fellow Midwestern contemporaries Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, and others are designated as “American Regionalist” painters.
Scenes depicting farming and church life, severe weather, and livestock are the subjects of some of his most well-known works.
Probably his most famous work is this image of the abolitionist John Brown. The work is titled “Tragic Prelude”.
This mural is merely one of a series of panels depicting the history of Kansas that adorn the walls of the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka.
While these specific “records” can be found online and in books and exhibition catalogs, I can vouch for the fact that there is no substitute for seeing these—or any artist’s—works of art in real life at full size.
