John Loy was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He began his art education at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and Colorado College, and continued his studies at Washington University, School of Fine Arts in St. Louis, Missouri. He was awarded a fellowship at the Yale-Norfolk Summer Art School in Norfolk, Connecticut in 1954. In 1958, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. After graduation, he returned to St. Louis, where he was appointed Program Director at the Peoples Art Center and taught drawing at the Washington University School of Architecture. In 1960, he joined the faculty at the School of Art, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, in Utica, NY, as a painting and drawing instructor. He taught there until his retirement in 1991. Around the same time, he was also the Gallery Director at the School of Art from 1978 to 1985.
John Loy has worked in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, collage, assemblage, printmaking, and stained glass. He has exhibited widely and frequently in solo and selected group exhibitions, and has won numerous awards. He and his wife, Mary Gaylord, were awarded a residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris in 1991. His work is represented in many public and private collections, and he has been listed in Who's Who American Art since 1966. In 2005, he had a retrospective exhibition, "3 Decades, 1950 to 1980," at the Kirkland Art Center in Clinton, NY and a sequel, "3 More Decades, 1981 to 2011," at the Kirkland Art Center.
