A native of Ohio, Keith Crown studied at the Art Institute in Chicago. In 1946, he graduated with a BFA and moved to Los Angeles where he took a faculty position at the University of Southern California. He regularly traveled to New Mexico where he found inspiration for much of his work. In 1956, he spent 4 months in Taos while on sabbatical. In the mid 1970s, he built a house in Talpa, New Mexico where he lived for part of each year, studying Navajo weaving and Pre-Columbian and Pueblo pottery. Images of the landscape and buildings of New Mexico are often seen intertwined with abstraction in his paintings.