Opening and Artist Talk: Exhibition: Wild Forms, Enduring Spirit, The Art & Legacy of Walter Piehl, Jr.

Presented by the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art in partnership with the Northwest Arts Center at Minot State University, North Dakota, this exhibition brings together for the first time an immersive and expansive selection of Artist and Rodeo Hall-of-Famer, Walter Piehl’s paintings, drawings, prints, and collages across three galleries. Co-curated by Nicole Maria Evans, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at Paris Gibson Square, and Gregory Vettel, Director of the Northwest Arts Center, the exhibition draws from the Minot State University collection, Northern Plains Heritage Foundation collection, Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, and private and artist holdings offering a rare opportunity to encounter the breadth of Piehl’s artistic practice.
Together, studio, history, teaching, and rodeo arena form the foundation of Piehl’s art. His layered, gestural paintings capture the rhythm of the rodeo, the depth of regional history, and the imaginative possibilities of the Northern Plains. In a moment when the nation is reflecting on its past and future, Piehl’s work reminds us that the story of America is not singular but regional, evolving, and deeply connected to the people and landscapes that shape it.
Born in 1942 in Marion, North Dakota, Piehl grew up on a farm without running water, where wind-powered electricity illuminated daily life. In the 1960s, his father transitioned into rodeo production, introducing Piehl to the arena that would become central to his artistic vision. For more than forty years, Piehl worked as a “crow’s nest” announcer, observing the explosive motion of riders, horses, and bulls from above. This elevated vantage-point shaped how he would later translate the dynamism of the rodeo into paint.
 
Piehl’s paintings pulse with the motion and drama of the arena; bucking horses, twisting bulls, spinning ropes, are rendered through expressive brushwork and sweeping marks. Influenced by modernist painters such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Larry Rivers, he transforms rodeo action into gestural abstraction: arcs, diagonals, and layered fields of color that capture movement as both physical and emotional force. His studio, filled with photographs, rodeo memorabilia, maps, and music, functions as both workspace and laboratory where ideas are continually tested, revised, and reimagined.