Roger Medearis: My Regionalism
“Gregg’s Barn” (1968), by Roger Medearis. Collection of Glenn and Patricia White Regionalism, to lift a few words from the exhibition brochure that accompanies work by Roger Medearis on view at the Huntington in San Marino, was “an American artistic movement during the 1930s and 1940s that rejected European abstraction, took subjects from everyday rural life and conspired to bring art to a wider audience through public art commissions and low cost reproductions.” The most famous example, and an iconic painting that everybody has seen, is Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” with its weathered Midwestern couple in front of a white farmhouse. Wood was part of that triumvirate which also included Thomas Hart Benton (most famously) and John Steuart Curry, which is not to say that any of these fellows were good buddies who hung out together. “Home in the San Gabriels” (1996), by Roger Medearis. Collection of Tom and Edwina Johnson Roger Medearis (1920-2001) also squares up as an American Regionalist, but one who falls just beneath the waterline of name recognition and visibility. As a youth he lived in Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas, enrolling in the Kansas City Art Institute in 1938 where…
Read this story on easyreadernews.com