Roger Medearis

Roger Norman Medearis was born on March 6, 1920, in Fayette, Missouri, the son of a Baptist minister. His family later moved to Oklahoma, and by 1938, at age eighteen, he had enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he studied under Thomas Hart Benton until 1941. He then left to serve as a draftsman with the U.S. Navy during World War II.

After the war, Regionalism fell out of critical favor as Abstract Expressionism rose, and in 1949 Medearis held a solo exhibition at Kende Galleries in New York that included his 1941 painting Godly Susan, now held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Facing a shrinking market for representational painting, he largely set aside his art career, working in sales; sources vary on the exact span of this hiatus, with his return to painting placed anywhere from the mid-1960s to the late 1960s. He later worked with dealers including Capricorn Galleries in Bethesda, Maryland, and Aaron Galleries, though available sources do not establish exact dates for either relationship. Medearis settled in San Marino, California, and continued painting until his death there on July 5, 2001, at age eighty-one; his cause of death is not confirmed in the sources consulted.

Medearis's critical footprint is small relative to his museum presence. The strongest single endorsement on record is Benton's own assessment that Medearis was his best student at the Kansas City Art Institute in the late 1930s, an assessment repeated in gallery and museum biographical materials rather than delivered as a formal, dateable quotation. His inclusion in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Huntington, Crystal Bridges, the Spencer Museum of Art, the Butler Institute, the Kemper Museum, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum constitutes his most substantial form of institutional validation. The Huntington's 2012 exhibition, Roger Medearis: His Regionalism, drawn largely from gifts by his widow, placed his work within the broader history of American Regionalism alongside Benton. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic writing in a major art publication could be confirmed in the available sources.

Medearis has no catalogue raisonne and, as of this writing, no gallery or agent appears to represent his estate; his work circulates through a scattered mix of regional dealers, print sellers, and auction houses rather than a single primary market channel. No source consulted documents a confirmed, fully sourced all-time auction record, meaning collectors should treat any single reported figure with caution. The highest publicly visible figure associated with his market is a Sotheby's American Art pre-sale estimate of roughly USD 40,000 to 60,000, attached to a 1948 painting cited as In the Big Rock Candy Mountains (also Big Rock Candy Mountain) and scheduled for a June 2020 sale; the auction house is confirmed, but the realized price, and whether the lot sold, are not documented in any source consulted. Gallery asking prices for individual paintings, such as a $35,000 listing for Rabbit Hunters, give a sense of retail levels but are not auction results.

Medearis's market is illiquid and thinly documented: there is no catalogue raisonne, no confirmed current gallery representation of the estate, and no reliably sourced all-time auction record. Provenance research should lean on the artist's own exhibition history at Kende Galleries, Capricorn Galleries, and Aaron Galleries, along with his archived papers at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. His deep museum presence is a genuine art-historical credential and a reason for durable interest, but it has not translated into a large, transparent auction market, so collectors should expect wide uncertainty around valuation for any individual work.