Walter Piehl Jr. - Retrospective: 1962 – 2018 | On view throughout the Main Level 5 September – 12 October 2025

Closing weekend reception on Sunday 12 October 2025
        2:30 - 4:30 P.M. | Artist talk at 3 P.M.

The Rourke Art Gallery + Museum is proud to be working in collaboration with the Minnesota State University Moorhead's Art Annex Gallery for this retrospective. Each gallery will be exhibiting half of the Walter Piehl Jr. Retrospective.
 

“I will always be a painter of Western Americana. The horse culture and the ranching culture were always so important to me—part of my everyday life. Pursuing art and pursuing that subject matter which was so important to me, naturally led me into all sorts of themes of the Wild West, of the tame West, of the rodeo and of the historic West.”

Walter Piehl, photo lithograph, "Memories of Jim Dandy and Sons," 1970

​Walter Piehl was born in Marion, North Dakota. He grew to love horses and the rodeo at an early age when he would assist his father, who was a stock contractor and part-time rodeo producer. His artistic talents and his love for the rodeo led him to explore the creative possibilities of putting the intense action of the sport to brush and canvas. After receiving his Bachelor’s degree in art from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, Piehl earned both an MA and an MFA from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.

     Piehl, having grown up in a state without the benefit of an art museum, became a teacher to not only pursue his love of painting but to teach and share his appreciation of art with others. Piehl has taught at the University of Minnesota, Mayville State College, as well as Valley City University. In 2018, he retired as an art professor at Minot State University where he had been teaching since 1970.

     His paintings, which demonstrate a unique blend of Western and contemporary artistic styles, have been shown at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian and Western Art, the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame, the Museum of the American Cowboy, the Missoula Art Museum, and the Yellowstone Art Museum, among many other galleries throughout the southwest and Midwest. The Plains Art Museum held Piehl’s first major retrospective in 2003, followed by the North Dakota Museum of Art and the Northwest Arts Center at Minot State University in 2018.

     His passion for rodeos, horses, cowboys, and cowgirls permeates nearly every artwork in this exhibition. Unlike the western artists familiar to many—Charles Russell and Frederic Remington—Walter chose a different path and left representational art behind to find his own unique style. His art always addresses the subject, whether a bucking bull and rider engaged in battle or a cowgirl swinging a rope, but in a way that engages the senses and enables the viewer to experience the action. Walter works his magic with explosive color, brushwork, and bold line. He draws a basic outline, and then uses pure color brushed, splattered, rubbed, and swiped onto the canvas or paper. Often the color obliterates the line. Walter acknowledges that he has a love affair with “line”. He describes “line” as his mojo, where his mind, hand, and brush connect like alchemy to bring life to the painting’s subject.

“I want people to know how fast a brush stroke was put on and that paint is a fluid medium, that it drips, and it splatters, and those drips and splatters are collateral enhancements...I want them to look like they were done in a frenzy of activity and that the paint was applied with great energy.”
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​     This retrospective showcases the scope of Walter's career from his early exploration as a student at Concordia College, Moorhead, MN, and the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, to the development of his signature style and method—as he would say it—of ‘putting on paint.’ The exhibition gives the viewers the opportunity to visually experience the evolution of an artist's style, looking at 56 years of creative energy.

     Widely recognized as one of North Dakota's senior painters and as an early pioneer of the contemporary cowboy art movement, Piehl is an aficionado of history and art with a lifelong passion for Western Americana. This stems from his upbringing in Marion, ND, in a ranching family that rode horses, raised stock and participated in rodeos.

     His passion for rodeo, horses, cowboys, and cowgirls permeates nearly every artwork. This exhibition is organized to highlight Piehl's many suites, the hallmark of his work, with interpretive panels for his different series: Sweethearts of the Rodeo, American Minotaur, Les Fauvres, Roping Fools, etc.
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Walter Piehl, acrylic on canvas, "Juicy Lucy," 2011