John De Puy

Born in 1927, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, John De Puy's original roots were in New Mexico, with his grandfather, who owned a ranch in Mora in the late 1800s. In the early 1950s, De Puy studied with artist Hans Hoffman in New York, following service in the military as a medic during WWII and the beginning of the Korean War.

De Puy visited Taos, New Mexico, in 1949 and returned in 1952 to study with Louis Ribak at the Taos Valley Art School through the GI Bill. De Puy, along with Louis Ribak, Beatrice Mandelman, Agnes Martin, Robert Ray, Earl Stroh, Cliff Harmon, Ted Egri, and several others, would become a group of like-minded modern artists known as the Taos Moderns.

During the 1950s, De Puy and author Edward Abbey made a pact they would 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 De Puy's work was held at the Roswell Museum & Art Center in 2006, titled The Ground of Being, and more recently, a 2016 retrospective of his work was shown at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos.

In March of 2023, De Puy passed away peacefully in his off-grid home in Ojo Caliente, NM.