Edward Laning

Edward Laning's first area of study was writing; however, he soon transferred to the Art Students League of New York in 1927, where he became a pupil of Max Weber, Boardman Robinson, John Sloan and Kenneth Hayes Miller. Through their influence he joined the Fourteenth Street School, a group of artists who depicted working-class life in the Union Square and Fourteenth Street area of New York. The group also included artists Isabel Bishop, Reginald Marsh, and Laning's future spouse, Mary Fife, whom he married in 1933. Laning’s 1931 painting Fourteenth Street was purchased for the Whitney Museum of American Art's first annual exhibition.

During the Great Depression, work was scarce. By 1935, Laning was registered in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) mural program. He completed a mural for the Dining Room in the Ellis Island immigration center, titled Role of the Immigrant in the Industrial Development of America. Laning's mural depicted the construction of the Pacific Railroad by Irish and Chinese immigrants, earning high praise and landing him a larger WPA mural commission at the New York Public Library in 1940. Laning also completed murals in two post offices in Kentucky and North Carolina, while directing the Department of Mural Painting at the Beaux Arts Institute until 1943.

During World War II, Laning was drafted as an artist correspondent and traveled to the Aleutian Islands, North Africa and Italy to create paintings of war scenes for Time magazine. After being wounded on the battlefield in 1944, Laning returned home with a Purple Heart and took a position as the head of the Painting Department at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design.

Laning received prestigious art awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Art Institute of Chicago's Kohnstamm Prize, and the Annual Grant of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. During the five years Laning spent at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design, he helped found the Mid-America Artists' Association, which reinstated the juried regional exhibitions that had ceased during the war. In 1950, Laning was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and spent two years traveling and painting in Italy.

Laning left his position in Kansas City in 1952 to take over his mentor Kenneth Hayes Miller's post at the Art Students League of New York. In 1958, Laning was named a National Academician by the National Academy of Design, and in 1963 he had a retrospective solo exhibition at the Griffin Gallery in New York. He also published books and articles on painting and his war days.

Laning completed two final murals in his late career, one in 1975 for his hometown that nostalgically depicted Petersburg, Illinois, through the idolized figure of Abraham Lincoln. His final mural was installed at the Ogden Railway Station in Utah. Laning completed the mural in 1980, one year before his death at age seventy-five.