Curry's parents were college educated, staunch Scotch Covenanters, and hard-working farmers. His childhood was disciplined by the rigors of daily farm chores while his imagination was stirred by the revival meetings, the severe storms and other aspects of the indigenous life of a Kansas farm community. In his mature work he turned that experience into a heighten realist imagry expressive of the spiritual values of America's heartland. Curry, with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, formed the triumverate known as the Regionalists, who represented the survival of a strong realist tradition in American painting in the twentieth century.
In 1916 Curry went to study at the Kansas City Art Institute, but remained only a month. He worked a short time on the railroads, earning enough to go to Chicago and study at the Art Institute. After serving in World War I he finished his education at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. In 1919 he went to Leonia, New Jersey, where he trained in illustration under Harvey Dunn, and began illustrating adventure stories for the popular magazines.
Following his marriage in 1923, and a year living in New York's Greenwich Village, he settled in Westport, Connecticut. By 1925 Curry's artistic aims had gone beyond illustration work. He made trips home to Kansas and to upstate New York for subjects for paintings. In 1926, recognizing a need to improve his drawing skills, Curry went to Paris. He lived in the studio of the American sculptor, Hunt Dietrich, drew in the Academy of the Russian artist Basil Schoukhaieff, copied in the Louvre, and painted the Paris street and cafe scene.
Arriving home in 1927 via London, Curry completed his first major work, Baptism in Kansas, which received favorable reviews when it was exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D. C. The following year he became a member of the Whitney Studio Club, in New York, which provided a stipend. He continued to work from the model, and attended anatomy lectures at the Art Students League. His first one-artist show at the Whitney Studio Club in 1930 estalished his reputation as a major painter.
During the 1930s, Curry was much occupied in teaching, at the Cooper Union, 1932-34, and the Art Students League, 1932-36, and with mural commissions, the work with which he is most associated. Among his murals in this period are Tragedy and Comedy in true fresco for the Westport High School, 1934, and Ancient Industry and Modern Hat Industry for the Norwalk (Connecticut) High School, 1936.
Curry's completed lunette murals, Movement of the Population Westward and Law Versus Mob Rule, for the United States Department of Justice Building, Washington, D. C., were installed in 1937, but only after major revisions had been made in the latter because of controversial content. In 1942, after he had been appointed artist-in-residence at the Agricultural College, University of Wisconsin, Madison, he was able to realize his original intention in his mural, Freeing of the Slaves, for the Law School library. Other murals in Washington, D. C. include Rush for the Oklahoma Land 1889 and Homesteading for the United States Department of the Interior, 1939. In 1938, Curry began a series of murals for the Kansas State Capitol at Topeka, which he considered the crowning achievement of his career, but were left incomplete because of adverse public reaction.
