Leonard Pryor

Leonard Pryor was an artist, educator and community organizer who dedicated his career to advocating for the arts and enriching Kansas City's creative community. After graduating from the partially integrated Topeka High School in 1942, Pryor served as a pharmacist in the U.S. Naval Medical Corps during World War II.

After his service, Pryor returned to Kansas City and married his high school sweetheart, Bernice Maxine Turner, and enrolled as the first African American student at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design. There he excelled under the instruction of professors such as Wilbur Niewald, graduating in 1951 as class president.  Pryor also studied and worked under Thomas Hart Benton at his studio in Kansas City.

He began teaching art and photography at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1951, eventually assuming the additional roles of chairman of the art department, basketball coach and school treasurer during the fifteen years he taught there.

In 1958, he earned a master's of fine arts from the Art Institute with a graduate thesis exploring the effects of color upon visual perception. He created a series of paintings rendered in limited earth-tones inspired by prehistoric cave art to further illustrate his ideas. In his thesis, he reflected that "It is necessary to take the tools at hand, which are within themselves nothing, and manipulate them with heart and mind and as much knowledge as one has in order to create a true and lasting statement of art"  (Pryor, "Painting," 7).

During the 1960s, Pryor was hired as a faculty member at the Art Institute while continuing to teach at Lincoln High School. He served as the college's first African American Academic Dean from 1968-1972. Pryor then took a position as District Coordinator of Art, Music, and Physical Education in the Kansas City Public Schools where he continued to work until his retirement in 1986.

Leonard Pryor contributed to a long list of community organizations throughout his career while participating in the Episcopal Church and raising two children. He was instrumental in founding the Ethnic Enrichment Commission in 1976 to celebrate cultures from around the world. 

During the last decades of his life, Leonard Pryor's artistic practice flourished and he had his first solo exhibition in 1999, at age seventy-five. In 2007, the Kansas City Art Institute created the Leonard Pryor Endowment, a scholarship to aid minority students' tuition and supplies. By the time of his death in 2015, Pryor had created a rich legacy celebrating the value of art through his influence in the school system, the municipal sphere, and the local art scene.