John DePuy American, 1927-2023

John DePuy was born on December 17, 1927, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He was a third generation New Mexican; his grandfather owned a ranch in Taos County in the late 1890s.

Following his studies at Columbia and Oxford Universities, DePuy joined the Artists League and studied under the German Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann.  After serving in the Korean War, DePuy was honorably discharged from the US Navy and moved to Taos where he became affiliated with the group of artists called Taos Modernists. 

The Taos Modernists were an influential group of artists who converged on Taos from large east and west coast metropolitan cities between the 1940s and 1960s.  Richard Diebenkorn, Edward Corbett, Agnes Martin and other non-objective abstract painters were instrumental in establishing Taos as a trail-blazing arts colony.  

DePuy is also recognized in the Southwest for his long friendship and shared environmental activism with the late writer, Edward Abbey.  “Ed was the brother I never had. There were many marches and protests that we were involved in and spent many years exploring the Colorado Plateau and Sonoran Desert. We took many, many risks together to protect the earth.”  Until he passed at age 96, DePuy upheld the pact he kept with Abbey to fight to protect and conserve the previously wild landscapes of the American Southwest-- one through a paintbrush, the other through a pen. Today, we now see many of these lands the artist painted throughout his career protected by park status or returned to their original caretakers.

A solo exhibition of DePuy's work was held at the Roswell Museum & Art Center in 2006 and in 2016 the first retrospective of his work was shown at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos.