Arthur Kraft

Born in 1922 in Kansas City, Missouri, Arthur Kraft was an American painter, muralist and sculptor and a member of the Expressionist movement, which focused on the use of subjective perceptions and distortion in order to incite emotions from the onlooker.

At the age of thirteen, Kraft began taking Saturday morning classes at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and selling his work at local art fairs, and later attended the Kansas City Art Institute and then Yale University’s School of Fine Arts in New Haven, Connecticut, where he finished his degree after serving in World War II.

In 1946, Kraft won the Audubon Artist Society national painting award, and had one-man exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and Paris, with installations of his work occurring across many U.S. institutions.

Kraft spent most of his life in his hometown of Kansas City and has many works integrated around the city, including a collection of bronze sculptures titled Court of Penguins on the Country Club Plaza and another sculpture titled Family, which was dedicated at the Commerce Building in 1961 and then re-installed at the Executive Plaza Office Building at 720 Main in 1989. His final work, before his death from cancer at the age of fifty-five in 1977, was a mural he created for the waiting room of the Veterans Hospital in Topeka, Kansas.

In 2007, the Arthur Kraft Memorial Scholarship for the Visual Arts was established with the Metropolitan Community College in Kansas City, Missouri.