Emmett Junius Craig

Dr. Emmett J. Craig was a dentist and sculptor who used his surgical skills to create portrait busts, figurative sculptures, and other works of art.

Emmett Junius Craig was born in 1878 in DeWitt, Missouri. His father was a physician, and the family later moved to Kansas City where Craig's father ran a successful medical practice. At first, Craig was not interested in art. He joined the Army and studied at the Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri. Like his father, he decided to pursue medicine, and went on to attend the Kansas City Western Dental College. In 1901, Craig became a U.S. Army dental surgeon and was deployed to the Philippines to treat wounded soldiers during the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars.

On the battlefield, Dr. Emmett J. Craig realized the relationship between dentistry and sculpture while performing delicate facial reconstruction surgeries. When Craig returned to Kansas City in 1910, he married Frances Russell and opened his own dental practice. Freed from his military duties, he began exploring his creative abilities as a sculptor. He enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute and studied with renowned artists Robert Merrell Gage and William Wallace Rosenbauer. In 1924 and 1925, Craig won two consecutive awards in sculpture at the Midwestern Artists' Exhibition.

Craig was fascinated by the connection between art and medicine. His study of dentistry gave him an in-depth knowledge of human anatomy that allowed him to achieve high technical accuracy in his figurative sculpture. His practice as a sculptor then helped him fine-tune his craft to perform better surgeries. Craig was a member of the Kansas City Society of Artists and participated in many of their exhibitions. He served as the organization's secretary for several years to develop their bylaws and membership. During the 1930s, he was a resident at the Gertrude Woolf Lighton Studios, the Society's headquarters and a central gathering place for artists.

Craig received commissions for memorial busts of many notable figures, including Dr. William Kuhn, Dr. Alvin Lorie and President Franklin Roosevelt. He exhibited widely and his sculptures were displayed across the city. All the while, Craig continued to work as a dentist and later became a faculty member at the Kansas City Western Dental College. His specialty was painless tooth extraction, on which gave frequent lectures at symposiums of the Missouri Dental Association. Dr. Emmett J. Craig died in 1939 from a long-term illness at age 61.