It depicts a dramatic scene in which a family races for shelter as a tornado approaches their farm, and has compositional connections to Curry's earlier 1928 painting Baptism in Kansas.

Following its 1930 debut, Tornado over Kansas was considered a notable Regionalist work, but native Kansans disliked the choice of subject matter.

Curry's work attracted criticism from contemporary painters Stuart Davis and Thomas Hart Benton, and logical inconsistencies and technical errors in the composition have been noted.

The two sons are distracted with rescuing pets: one holds onto a struggling black cat and another brings a litter of puppies, watched closely by their canine mother.

The art historian Irma Jaffe posited that Curry's Christian religious upbringing led to his construing natural disasters as signs of God's punishment.

Gray Sweeney's interpretation that Tornado over Kansas is an achievement of Curry's goal to "depict the American farmer's incessant struggle against the forces of nature.

[6] The two works share similar settings, and in both, crowded groups of figures in the foregrounds create a sense of claustrophobia (which Curry suffered from) while the near empty backgrounds evoke agoraphobia.

Two years later, a Time article on the exhibition described Curry's tornado as a "giant cornucopia" and wrote that Kansans found the painting "uncivic".

[5] For example, Elsie Nuzman Allen—the art-collecting wife of former Kansas governor Henry Justin Allen—complained that Curry painted cyclones and other "freakish subjects" instead of "the glories of his home State".

[30] Due to the magazine's readership of 485,000 during the 1930s, Time helped give Regionalist works a national audience while also eliciting resentment among some over the art movement's sudden popularity.

[9] The amateurish draftsmanship was noted by scholars including Kroiz, who wrote that Curry's use of color created "a riot of tertiary hues that confuse the viewer's eye".

She described the work's green-blue shadows as "strange",[4] and believed that the lighter halo-like region around the father's head was due to a mistake made while Curry was painting in the sky.

[33] Thus, Kroiz found that the painting is in stark contrast to more technically proficient works by the contemporary Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton.

[32] Curry himself admitted to both Tornado over Kansas's compositional shortcomings and his then lack of technical expertise, revealing what scholars interpreted as possible signs of the artist's depression, stress, and self-doubt.

Nonetheless, Curry's openness instructed the public, and Kroiz believed it helped make painting more approachable for amateurs and common people.

In a letter to Curry, Kneeland explained his attraction to the work:[15] I find ... a certain native quality which interests me because I was born and brought up in Michigan and while I have never seen a tornado of this kind I can well remember school being let out and running for dear life for home, with the branches torn off the trees ... the whole picture seems to strike a home chord in me.Nevertheless, Tornado over Kansas was acquired in 1935 by the Hackley Art Gallery (now the Muskegon Museum of Art) from Ferargil Galleries,[15] a venue for exhibitions of Curry's work during the early 1930s.

[15] Because of its artistic and cultural significance, Tornado over Kansas was described by the Muskegon Museum of Art as a "national treasure" and a defining work of Curry's career and the Regionalist movement.