Ward Lockwood was a Kansas-born painter and educator whose modernist landscape and mural painting moved between the Taos art colony, the federal mural programs of the New Deal, and the university art departments of Texas and California across a working life of fifty years.
John Ward Lockwood (September 22, 1894 – July 6, 1963) was an American painter, muralist, and art educator, born in Atchison, Kansas. He studied at the University of Kansas under W. A. Griffith from 1912, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1914 to 1916 under Henry McCarter, and after a two-year Army tour in France during the First World War, returned to Paris in 1921 and attended classes at the Académie Ranson under Maurice Denis and Jules Zingg. The combined American and French training gave him an unusual breadth, academic figure painting, Cézannean structural composition, and direct exposure to the post-Impressionist and early modernist French traditions.
He moved to Taos in 1928 and worked there for the next decade alongside Kenneth Adams, John Marin, and Andrew Dasburg, helping to push the New Mexican painting tradition in a more openly modernist direction; watercolor was his preferred medium for the freedom of handling it allowed. Through the 1930s he produced a substantial body of mural commissions for the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture, including the murals at the Taos County Courthouse (1933–34), the Wichita post office, the Post Office Department Building in Washington, and post offices in Lexington, Edinburg, and Hamilton. From 1938 he chaired and built the art department at the University of Texas; from 1949 to 1961 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley; and his work is held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the New Mexico Museum of Art, among others.