Covey grew up in the succession of towns in Missouri and Kansas where his restless father tried various ventures in farming and small businesses. By the time he was in his teens he was living in the Oklahoma Territory, his father and older brother having made the Run on the Cherokee Strip in 1893. He attended Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas, for the year 1895-96, and there received his first art instruction from Edith Dunlevy. It was she who encouraged him to move on to the school of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied under John H. Vanderpoel, Frederick Freer and Frank Duveneck from 1897 to 1899. The next two years he worked as staff artist and art editor for first the Indianapolis (Indiana) Press, and then the Cleveland (Ohio) Plain Dealer. In 1902 he was back in Chicago for another year of study before going abroad. By 1904 he was studing under the American-born Karl Marr at the Royal Academy, Munich. Covey was in London for the years 1905-08, assisting the English painter Frank Brangwyn in his mural painting.
Upon returning to New York in 1908, he worked at magazine illustration. It was not until 1913 that Covey once again was involved in the art form that would become his speciality, mural painting, when he assisted Robert Reid in executing eight panels for the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition. His initial independent work as a muralist was for department stores: Romance of Trade in eighteen panels for Lord and Taylor's, New York, 1916-17; and Ten Centuries of Men's and Women's Costumes, a four-hundred foot frieze for Filene's, Boston, Massachusetts, 1919-20.
Covey's first commission for an industrial theme mural, the subject with which he was most associated, came in 1921 from the Kohler Company, Kohler, Wisconsin. Mural commissions from Libby Glass, Willy Overland, Singer Sewing Machine, the Squibb Corporation, among others, occupied him through much of the 1920s and 1930s. The later 1930s and early '40s were congenial years for mural painters. In 1939 Covey executed the exterior decorations in pierced brass and redwood for the Contemporary Arts Building at the New York World's Fair, and the dome decorations of the Land Plane Building of La Guardia Airport, New York. He did murals for Bridgeport and Torrington, Connecticut post offices in 1935 and 1937, respectively, and in 1940 for the Anderson, South Carolina, Federal Court and post office. Covey's last major mural commission was for the ceiling of Trinity Lutheran Church, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Covey lived in New York, and maintained a summer home in Harwinton, Connecticut. From 1926 to 1929 he was president of the National Society of Mural Painters; from 1930 to 1944 he was on the faculty of the Academy school, and served on the Council, 1936-37. In 1945 he began spending winters in Florida.
In 1960 Covey's second wife, Lois Lensky, and author and illustrator of children's books, presented a collection of his works to Southwestern College in honor of Edith Dunlevy.
