John Brown,

1939

Curry here lionizes the white militant abolitionist John Brown, who in the late 1850s attempted to incite an armed uprising of enslaved people in events that have come to be seen as a prelude to the Civil War. Curry depicts Brown as a messianic figure, his eyes wide and hair disheveled, as a tornado rages behind and a diminutive Black figure gazes at him from below. In 1859 Brown was caught during a raid on a federal armory, tried for treason, and executed. This print relates to a mural that Curry was commissioned to paint in the Kansas State Capitol, in which Brown is the central protagonist. Like other historical figures depicted in this exhibition, though Brown was considered a radical, treasonous insurrectionist by his contemporaries, he came to be venerated as an American hero, as shown in Curry’s image.