A suburban Kansas City school district has found a new home for a Thomas Hart Benton painting that it was keeping locked up because it was considered too valuable to display at a school.
The painting "Utah Highlands" will be on long-term loan at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, starting in late April, the school and museum announced this past week.
The Shawnee Mission School District had kept the painting in a vault for safekeeping after it was appraised at $700,000. Students who donated the painting in 1957 as a class gift began asking where the painting was after The Kansas City Star reported earlier this year that it was no longer being displayed.
