Midwesterner Turner B. Messick was educated in New York City at the National Academy of Design and Columbia University. He studied with the likes of Robert Henri and George Bellows of the New York Ashcan school. The artist was ultimately drawn west, where in places like Denver, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles, he moved in modernist circles. He works as an artist, a teacher, and, in Colorado, administrator of the WPA Arts Program during WWII.  Today, Messick is best known for his western landscapes of the 1940s.