sketch for Kansas Pastoral I (The Unmortgaged Farm), John Steuart Curry

Exhibition Label: “Conversation II: Place-Kansas,” Apr-2008, Emily Stamey “I have been accused of seeing only the dark and seamy side of my native state. In these panels I shall show the beauty of real things under the hand of a beneficent Nature-and we can suppose in these panels that the farm depicted is unmortgaged-that grain and cattle prices are rising on the Kansas City and Chicago markets-so that we as farmers, patrons, and artists can shout happily together, ‘Ad Astra Per Aspera’ [‘To the Stars Through Difficulties’].” John Steuart Curry Quoted in M. Sue Kendall, Rethinking Regionalism: John Steuart Curry and the Kansas Mural Controversy (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986). Exhibition Label: "John Steuart Curry: Agrarian Allegories," Aug-2006, Kate Meyer Curry’s vision of a Kansas family farm seems typical and even nostalgic by modern standards, but this agrarian scene serves as an idyllic potential future compared to the hard times of the 1930s. The crops have been harvested, and the livestock graze contentedly at an orderly, well-kept farm that has not been mortgaged. The concrete grain silo in the distance would have only been available to the most modern farms by 1937, and the farmer stands at ease, gazing at his acreage rather than working the fields. Curry believed that modern agricultural techniques and practices would reduce the labor necessary to run a farm, leaving more leisure time for farm families. The farmer and wife stand in divided spheres of barnyard and home, their gender roles further reinforced as the farmer presides over his hogs and the mother nurtures her children while the nearby hen tends to her own young brood.