Meet the Artist

John C. Menihan (1908–1992) was one of upstate New York’s most prominent and beloved artists. Though he never sought national fame, his work is represented in major collections including the British Museum, the Boston Athenaeum, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. and Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery.

Born in Rochester, he showed early promise — designing a magazine cover at 16 and later studying at Phillips Exeter, East High, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he created stage designs for the Mask and Wig Club. In the 1930s he produced portraits for local publications, discovered lithography under master Bolton Brown, and soon exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, Albright Art Gallery, and the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

After wartime work in his family’s parachute business, Menihan resumed art with vigor. In 1947 he won four first prizes in oil, watercolor, printmaking, and drawing at the Finger Lakes Exhibition — an unprecedented sweep. Over the following decades he painted portraits, designed stained glass and liturgical works, and executed major murals for Xerox, R.T. French, Security Trust (112 feet long), and Rochester Telephone. Menihan taught drawing and painting at the University of Rochester spanning more than two decades, while also teaching classes at the Memorial Art Gallery.

A series of exhibitions in the 1980s, highlighted by a retrospective at Nazareth College and a prints exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery, along with two posthumous exhibitions at Nazareth College and St. John Fisher College, confirmed the enduring legacy of his work. Menihan died in 1992, survived by his wife Margaret (d. 1998), daughter Mary, and sons John (d. 2016), Tom, and Peter.