Roger Medearis
American artist (1920-2001)
Roger Medearis (March 6, 1920 – July 5, 2001) was an American Regionalist painter.
Career
He was a student of Thomas Hart Benton while at the Kansas City Art Institute in the late 1930s and took up the technique of egg tempera painting, a rediscovered medium popular with Regionalists. Benton introduced Medearis to the Associated American Artists Gallery in New York City, from which he sold a portrait of his grandmother, Godly Susan, now in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
After World War II, Regionalist art fell out of fashion, replaced by Abstract Expressionism. Unable to sell his works, Medearis stopped painting. In 1966, Philip Desind, a Maryland art dealer, discovered Medearis' work and encouraged him to return to painting. Medearis painted new works until his death in 2001.
Medearis' paintings and lithographs can be found in the collections of the Butler Institute of American Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. He also has a painting hanging next to one of Thomas Hart Benton at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. His later years were spent in San Marino with his wife and children.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7358634. VIAF identifies the subject as 8997779. The Library of Congress control number is n89668957. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 2001 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roger Medearis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.