Ward Lockwood

John Ward Lockwood (September 22, 1894–July 6, 1963) was an American painter, art teacher and veteran of two world wars.

During the New Deal era of public artwork commissions for new federal buildings, Lockwood was hired by the Treasury Department Section of Painting and Sculpture to paint murals at the new post office buildings in Edinburg, Texas, and Hamilton, Texas, as well as at Taos County Courthouse, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, in the lobby of the federal courthouse in Wichita, Kansas, and in a courtroom at the federal courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky. The murals in Colorado Springs, on theme of “classic American theater,” will be removed sometime during or after 2022, “due to racist imagery and damage accumulated from their location in a food service area.” The Post Office (now Clinton Federal Building) murals were challenged for their depiction of Native Americans in the early 2000s.

Lockwood advocated strongly for the only abstract art post office mural that was ever commissioned by the Section, Lloyd Ney’s New London Facets in New London, Ohio.

He studied at the University of Kansas, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and Academy Ransom in Paris. He taught art at both UC Berkeley and the University of Texas. and in the Army Air Corps during World War II, retiring as a lieutenant colonel (possibly full colonel ) in 1954.