Tragic Prelude
Centered on the north wall is the gigantic figure of John Brown. In his outstretched left hand the word of God and in the right a ‘Beecher’s bible.’ Beside him facing each other are the contending free-soil and pro-slavery forces. At their feet, two figures symbolic of the million-and-a-half dead of the North and South.In this group is expressed the fratricidal fury that first flamed on the plains of Kansas…. Back of this group are the pioneers and their wagons on the endless trek to the West, and back of all the tornado and the raging prairie fire, fitting symbols of the destruction of the coming Civil War.
Kansas Pastoral
I have been accused of seeing only the dark and seamy side of my native state. In these panels I shall show the beauty of real things under the hand of a beneficent Nature—and we can suppose in these panels that the farm depicted is unmortgaged—that grain and cattle prices are rising on the Kansas City and Chicago markets—so that we as farmers, patrons, and artists can shout happily together, ‘Ad Astra Per Aspera’ [‘To the Stars Through Difficulties’]. John Steuart Curry
Quoted in M. Sue Kendall, Rethinking Regionalism: John Steuart Curry and the Kansas Mural Controversy (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986).