John McCrady

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John McCrady (September 11, 1911 – December 24, 1968) was a Louisiana painter and printmaker known for portraying Southern life and African American subjects. He was born in Canton, Mississippi, and grew up in the American South. After winning a scholarship to the Art Students League of New York for Portrait of a Negro, he studied with Thomas Hart Benton and Kenneth Hayes Miller. His work drew on Regionalism and often depicted religious and social life in African American communities.

McCrady studied at the Arts and Crafts Club of New Orleans School of Art, the University of Mississippi, the New Orleans Art School, and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1938 he married Mary Basso; they had a daughter in 1941. He opened the John McCrady School of Art in 1942 on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, where students included Alan Flattmann, Ida Kohlmeyer, Rolland Golden, and Robert Malcolm Rucker.

He painted murals for the Federal Art Project, including Amory, Mississippi, 1889 for the Amory post office. In 1939 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to paint the life and faith of the southern Negro. In 1940 he joined Associated American Artists and, under Caroline Durieux, worked in lithography, creating four silkscreens to support the war effort and a small number of lithographs overall. In 1942 he made war posters for the War Services Office.

A 1946 article in The Daily Worker criticized his work, leading him to slow his production for about ten years. When he returned to art, he focused more on rural life, Mardi Gras, and the French Quarter. He received a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1949 and completed three murals for the Bank of Oxford in Oxford, Mississippi, before his sudden death in 1968 from cancer.

McCrady’s work is housed in collections at the Georgia Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Louisiana State Museum, and the University of Mississippi Museum. The Historic New Orleans Collection preserves some of his papers and the records of the John McCrady School of Art.