About the Artist

Raised in Indiana, Keith Crown first drove through Taos in the late 1940s, on a cross-country trip from Chicago. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and took a teaching position at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. While driving west, he was struck by the Taos landscapes.

Before he moved to Columbia in 1983, Crown retired from teaching and spent his summers in Taos studying Navajo weaving and pre-Columbian and Pueblo pottery, which rely on abstract representations of nature. His work famously combines abstract art with natural landscapes.