Kindred McLeary

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Kindred McLeary (b. December 3, 1901, Weimar, Texas - d. May 29, 1949) was an American architect, artist and educator.

He studied architecture at the University of Texas and earned his degree in 1927. While teaching at the University of Texas the following year, McLeary entered one of his paintings, Cotton, in a national art exhibit at the Witte Memorial Museum in San Antonio. The painting portrayed an African-American woman reclining in a field of cotton with several men standing around her, one of them strumming a guitar. Some artists and ministers attacked the picture as obscene, but the art curator of the museum defended it and kept it hanging throughout the exhibit, despite the controversy (Univ. of Texas Biographical Handbook).

Later that year McLeary began teaching architecture at Carnegie Tech, where he remained until his untimely death, aged 48, following a fall from the roof of his studio near Confluence, Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

McLeary was also a noted muralist. His best-known mural, America the Mighty (1941; also known as Defense of Human Freedoms), is a depiction of scenes of war. McLeary also painted murals in, among other places, his adopted home of Pittsburgh, at the Somerset County, Pennsylvania library, and as far away as New York City (at the Madison Avenue Post Office).

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