2026 Graduate of the Year: A Life Changed by Culver

 

Before Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s work graced the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago and other distinguished museums around the world, before his work was in demand by art collectors and celebrities, before Mick Jagger asked him to design the cover for the latest Rolling Stones album, his Culver Academies family recognized his potential and talent.

That belief started with Elaine Hunter, an assistant principal at Quinn’s Chicago school whose son, Steven Hunter ’95, was a fourth-classman at Culver Military Academy. She saw a bright student and gifted artist who she believed could thrive under the right circumstances. She encouraged him to apply for a scholarship to Culver.

Two weeks after applying, Quinn learned he had been awarded a full four-year scholarship covering tuition, room and board that would get him out of the Robert Taylor Homes projects on Chicago’s South Side. That’s where he lived with his parents, who were illiterate, and his four older brothers, who had dropped out of high school.

“I grew up in a very violent community with a severe lack of resources. Being admitted into Culver was my escape from a community that would have surely annihilated me if I had not escaped it,” Quinn said.

At Culver, others reinforced that belief in Quinn. When he was accepted to Interlochen Arts Camp but lacked the $500 needed to attend, fellow students raised the money.

“That allowed me to go,” Quinn said.

These were two early examples of Culver people believing in him and supporting his journey. His work was recognized again recently when he was back on campus to be honored as the 2026 Graduate of the Year.

The recognition represented a full-circle moment, tracing a path from a teenage student seeking safety and opportunity to an internationally exhibited artist.

“I am genuinely honored. I can’t believe this is actually happening. So I am humbly grateful. Thank you very much,” he said.

For Quinn, the recognition is inseparable from the institution that helped shape him. Quinn doesn’t know what his life would have been if not for Culver Academies.

“Well, for me, Culver was in many respects my salvation on earth. It was my escape from poverty,” Quinn said.

Quinn was awed when he first stepped onto campus.

“I was blown away,” he said. “I didn't think anything in the world like that ever existed.”
 

Sharp uniforms, Gothic architecture, manicured grounds, a lakefront library and strong academic expectations left an immediate impression.

“Everything about it was absolutely captivating,” Quinn said.

Among Quinn’s most powerful Culver memories is lying in bed on his first night in the Band barrack. He came from a community where gunshots or mayhem often could be heard. On the Culver campus, “I heard serenity and tranquility, calm. That was a very foreign experience for me. And I thought, ‘I am exactly where I am supposed to be. Like, this is perfect.’ ”

He also realized something on his first day of class at Culver.

“I’m sitting next to these young people and I realized, they are ahead of me academically. Many of the students already had experience with algebra, trigonometry, for example. For me, this was foreign territory,” he said.

But he also found study centers where he could get help.

“I took advantage of that. Those experiences, those lessons gave me the weaponry to sustain the journey that I found myself on,” he said.

A month after arriving at Culver, he received heartbreaking news that his mother, Mary, had unexpectedly died. He went home to Chicago to attend the funeral with his father and four older brothers.

A month later, when he returned to Chicago for Thanksgiving break, when he got to the family apartment the door was open and his father and brothers were gone. He never saw them again.

Quinn returned to his home at Culver. He came up with a way of dealing with the loss of his mother.

On Sundays the Corps of Cadets marched to the campus Oval in full dress uniform. The event included combined maneuver units and the band. After the parade and retreat, students have free time to relax, grab food, or socialize with visiting family and friends.

When the crowd cleared, Quinn would sit alone on a grass mound with his Walkman on and mourn the loss of his mother, listening to “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” by Al Green.

Quinn tried sharing his loss with some classmates, but they couldn’t relate to what he went through.

“I understood that. I empathized with my peers. I just understood, this is unfair to expect them to relate to this. Most 15-year-olds don’t want to think about the death of a mom, because their mom was alive. So, I thought to myself, ‘Well, let me take time out to myself and approach this from a spiritual place just for me. And then when I go back into the world of Culver, I can be normal with my peers.’ And every Sunday, that's what I did.”

He later added his mother’s name to his to honor her.

Quinn spent every weekend in the Huffington Library.

“You had access to so much literature and text. I just buried myself into learning and enriching myself,” he said. “I was there on scholarship, and the scholarship was closely tied to my GPA. So it was important for me.”

He said there was another reason he loved studying.

“I love getting the gold and the silver A’s on my lapel. I just thought it looked really cool. I wanted all gold A’s, because the gold and the blue look good together. I thought, ‘Well, if I continue to work hard for academic excellence, I can continue to embellish my style with my uniform.’ It was very enriching. That library is fantastic,” he said.

It was within Culver’s art department that Quinn found what he calls a “sublime oasis.”

“It was small, it was quaint,” he said. “But what made it wonderful for me were the Duffies.”

The late Charles Duff was a master art instructor who taught at Culver from 1976-96 and Anne Duff was the John W. Bays chair of Fine Arts before retiring after teaching at Culver for 22 years. They introduced Quinn to Impressionism, Matisse, the use of color, and the study of light — formative lessons that still shape his work.

Those influences extended beyond the studio.

Quinn said Choir Director Cynthia Friley also played a pivotal role. She worked in the summer at Interlochen and suggested that he apply.

“I did apply with my art portfolio that I developed with the assistance of the Duffies. I was admitted, but I needed $500 more to complete the tuition. Several students raised the money for me,” he said.

Culver administrators helped him get a full scholarship to Wabash College. He graduated in 2000 with a double major in art and psychology.

He then earned his Master of Fine Arts at New York University in 2002.

From 2002 until 2013, Quinn paid the bills by working as an adjunct professor, working with at-risk students for a nonprofit agency and providing one-on-one tutoring while working every night in the studio he had set up in the second bedroom of his two-bedroom apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. He said his colleagues would frequently invite him out for drinks, but he would always decline.

He wanted to get home and make art.

“I did that faithfully. I thought that was going to just be my life. I thought I’d be a teacher, and then on my off time, I would make art and then I would try to do shows here and there, maybe make a sale or two. I was happy with that. Because you have to understand, I was coming from a very bleak place. So for me, going to Culver was already an astounding achievement. And then I got to go to college and I got to go to grad school.

 

“As far as I was concerned, I was already on top of the world,” he said. “My drive was fueled by a need to survive, to achieve and to accomplish things. I wanted my life to be positive. I wanted to be fulfilled for myself. That was very important.”

He was giving a tutoring session at a student’s home with impressive art. He asked the student’s mother if she was an art collector. She said she was.

“I said, ‘Oh, that's fantastic. I’m an artist.’ And she and I began to talk. I later invited her to my studio,” Quinn said. “I showed her my work. She loved it. She invited me to do a show at her brownstone on the parlor floor. She said, ‘Hey, I want to help you in any way that I can. I would invite some people over to look at your work because I believe in you.’ ”

Quinn had four pieces to show and wanted a fifth. But he only had five hours. He couldn’t make a painting in five hours.

He decided to create a piece using paper, charcoal and gouache, a type of opaque watercolor where pigment is mixed with a binder such as gum or glue. He got to work, setting boundaries.

“So I said, ‘Well, I don't have time to draw the entire face. I need to just focus on the essentials.’ What that meant was no forehead, no cheeks, no chin, no bridge of the nose, get rid of all of that. Just draw the eyes, nose, lips. That’s it. Maybe an ear. And then I’ll put a fur hat on the crown,” he said.
 

He taped construction paper onto the drawing paper to block off areas, drawing facial elements in sections. When he finished, the drawing paper was covered with scraps of construction paper.

“So I had to remove all the scraps of paper, like opening a birthday present. And when I removed the paper, I had come upon an outcome that got me. I could not believe I had made it work,” he said. “And that is how, in essence, I practically stumbled upon this process of making my works.”

When he stepped back, he recognized the mouth of his brother Charles, the brother who told their mother to look at Quinn’s art when she reprimanded him for drawing on the wall. He named the painting “Charles.”

The distinctive style he created has been compared with Romare Bearden and Francis Bacon. Quinn said he liked the visual impact of Bearden’s work, saying he finds it “dynamic.”

“And I found that that approach to making my work was a good avenue for expressing the multiplicity in identity and especially in relation to my upbringing and my family abandonment,” he said.

But he said he takes a much different approach than Bearden.

“Because everything I make starts with a vision first, like a mental picture that comes to me. And then I visually broadcast the image on paper or canvas. And the vision tells me what materials I need to use and what needs to be dealt with it. So I use a combination of oil paints, black charcoal, soft pastel and gouache on paper or canvas to construct the images,” he said.

The head of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art in Brooklyn saw “Charles” and placed it and five more of Quinn’s works on display. That led to William Villalongo, a Yale University art professor, including Quinn’s work in a show at the Susan-Inglett Gallery in Chelsea.

In January 2014, the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote of the show:

“There’s a lot of expertly made violence on hand: torn-apart heads, for example, in a bronze sculpture by Suntek Chug and in a drawing by Nathaniel Mary Quinn.”

Quinn’s career took off. He says his inspirations for his art come from three pillars: childhood memories of his family and Chicago, art historical exploration, particularly as it relates to realism, and contemporary issues, “like my interest in music or film, or my critical response to the political landscape.”

Quinn’s art resists easy categorization. He does not paint portraits; he paints what he calls “reflections.”

“I want to paint the essence of you. Not your face, not your physical face, but the part of you that most people don’t see,” he said.

His work explores the constant search to portray complex human identity.

One of his noted works is “Erica with the Pearl Earring,” which he said he wanted to “revisit” Vermeer’s “Girl with the Pearl Earring” while making a reflection of a memory of a girl named Erica he knew in Chicago.

“I thought it would be a beautiful ode to her to juxtapose her memory with the enduring prowess of this great painting by one of the world’s greatest painters,” Quinn said.

Quinn credits the Academies with instilling habits that remain central to his artistic practice today.

He had a big show last September in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. He had a year to prepare and make 14 new reflections. For Quinn, this discipline translated directly

into the studio.

“You have to place yourself on a schedule and you have to meet certain deadlines, and that means doing the work, even during times when you don’t feel like doing the work,” he said. “I had a daily routine. I get up, I take a walk, a coffee walk with my wife. I get back home. I go to the studio. I exercise from 12 to 1 p.m. Then from 1 to 2 p.m. I do reading. And then from 2 p.m. to 2:30 or 3 a.m. I make art.”

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio owns several pieces of Quinn’s art. DiCaprio said he told Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger about Quinn, which is how Quinn ended up designing the band’s cover for their album “Foreign Tongues,” released in July.

Jagger and Quinn started talking about ideas for the cover. Quinn suggested taking parts of the faces of Jagger, Keith Richards and Ron Wood and combining them into one face.

“He says, ‘Bloody hell, that’s amazing. I love that idea!’ ” Quinn said.

Richards also wanted to meet Quinn, so he invited him to a Manhattan studio. “So I hang out with Keith Richards all night,” he said.

Quinn’s future includes major museum exhibitions and international showcases. The same weekend he was at Culver for Reunion, a solo exhibition honoring his mother, “A Love Letter to My Mother,” opened in Chicago at the National Public Housing Museum. The exhibition, which runs through Aug. 23, included a replica of his family’s living room in their apartment.

Next year he will have a solo booth at Frieze London with Gagosian Gallery, and there are many more to come.

“As long as I have breath in my body, I am very confident that I will have these really special, critical museum shows at these different spaces throughout the world,” he said.

His story reflects Culver’s mission: resilience, discipline and purpose. It shows what can happen when a young person is given the structure, support and belief to imagine a different future.

Quinn remains stunned by his success.

“I pinch myself. It’s shocking,” he said.

And he has an undying appreciation for Culver.

 

“It is the best educational institution I’ve ever attended in my life. And it's not even close.”

He said he tells all his friends with children that they should send their children to Culver.

“It’s a life-changing experience. I believe it because it’s true,” he said.