Holy Rollers: John Steuart Curry, American Regionalism, and Religion in Motion

Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, Affiliated faculty and Curator of American Art at the Georgia Museum of Art

John Steuart Curry, Baptism in Kansas, 1928. Oil on canvas, 40 ¼ x 50 ¼ in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 31.159. © Estate of John Steuart Curry

In the late 1920s and 1930s, American regionalist painter John Steuart Curry created a series of religious-themed pictures, which reveal surprising intersections between technologized mobility and “old-time religion.” Curry’s images anticipate the work of Farm Security Administration photographers like Dorothea Lange, who showed religious faith as a sustaining and re-stabilizing force for dislocated Midwesterners. In a period of revolutionizing internal movements of communities and peoples, Curry’s paintings constructed a spiritual language for a Midwest in motion, demonstrating how religion could play a central role in—and give organized meaning to—modern American experience.