Selected Works by Mary Ann Currier

“Mary Ann Currier paints the world both around and within her, illuminating the majesty and mystery of the everyday with her concentrated, poetic vision,” wrote Alice Gray Stites, curator of the retrospective exhibit of Currier’s work at the Speed Art Museum in 2005.

Born and raised in Louisville, Currier studied in Chicago and then returned to Louisville to teach at the Louisville School of Art. In the 1960s and ’70s, she experimented with a variety of styles, forms, and materials, but by the mid-1970s, she was focusing on still-life painting. Her works have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and are included in numerous private, corporate, and public collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Speed Art Museum, the Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art, American Express, ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, and Cargill Inc.

Currier is regarded as an important contemporary American realist painter. As narrative from the Speed Museum notes, “While Currier’s fruits and vegetables, dishes, and textiles demonstrate the influence of the Old Master Dutch and Spanish still-life painters, they are clearly of this moment. They illustrate the continued vitality of realism in contemporary art, emphasizing the visual poetry in the artist’s large-scale still-life paintings.”

This online gallery reflects a progression of Currier’s works, including examples of stripe paintings and black-and-white florals from the 1970s; color pastels and her “postcard series” from the 1980s; and her more recent works depicting glass, fruit, and roses.