Waylande Gregory was raised in a small town in Kansas where, as a child, he made mud sculptures and glazed them with syrup. In 1933 he settled on a farm in New Jersey, where he operated the world’s largest kiln, executing important commissions for the 1939 New York World’s Fair and the Municipal Center in Washington, D.C. Gregory’s career declined in the 1950s, a casualty of the artist’s personal problems and the rise of abstract expressionism, which made Gregory’s figural work seem old-fashioned.