"Pines in Loose Park I" Oil on linen, 29" x 36", 2003

Noted Kansas City painter Wilbur Niewald will share his artistic vision with Lance Esplund, chief art critic for The New York Sun, and the public-at-large, to open his show, "Wilbur Niewald: A Retrospective, 1951 -2004," November 4 at The Rider University Art Gallery. Deborah Rosenthal, Rider professor and New York artist, curates the show.

The exhibition will run through Sunday, December 12 on the top floor of the Bart Luedeke Center. It will feature work from the whole span of Niewald's career, including early abstractions, and the still lifes, landscapes, and figure paintings to which he has dedicated himself over the past several decades. The show originated in the Midwest, starting at The Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in Saint Joseph, MO, and at The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University in Manhattan, KS. Niewald's paintings make their debut for the first time in a non-museum venue at The Rider Art Gallery.

An opening reception will take place from 5 to 8 p.m. Esplund will conduct a formal conversation with the artist at 6:30 p.m. that evening in the gallery. Both exhibition and reception are free and open to the public.

Born in 1925 in Kansas City, Niewald had decades-long association with the prestigious Kansas City Art Institute, an undergraduate art school where he studied, taught, and for many years, served as chair of the painting and printmaking department, known as one of the best traditionally based programs in the country. In 1988, his teaching was recognized by the College Art Association, which gave him its Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award. Fellow painters elected him in 1994 to membership in the National Academy of Design. Niewald's work is included in numerous public and private collections in the Kansas City area, and 1995, one of his paintings was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Rosenthal has also taught under Niewald at the Kansas City Art Institute. "His vision of an atelier system of teaching was to let you simply run a studio where students drew and painted and looked at paintings all day; where when you taught you were not teaching a curriculum but serving as a mentor, bringing students to a realization about what the life and work of a painter are," said Rosenthal. "There is no difference between Niewald the artist and Niewald the teacher."

The exhibition is funded in part by a grant from the Mercer County Cultural and Heritage Commission/New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State. Gallery hours are from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday and noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday. For more information, call (609) 895-5589.

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