Bruce Walters
Email: bwalters1@mchsi.com
Bruce Walters (born November 29, 1954 in Davenport, Iowa), is an artist who has exhibitioned digital artworks, graphite drawings and paintings primarily in the American Midwest. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and BA from the University of Iowa. He is a Professor of Art at Western Illinois University.
Walters’ artwork has been included in more than one hundred solo, invitational, and competitive exhibitions. Though his work has been primarily exhibited in galleries in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, his work has been shown in London, England, Germany, Japan, New York and Washington DC. He has won best of show awards in seven different media: from graphite drawings to digital artwork.
Walters is currently working on Halloween Flight (www.halloweenflight.com), an exhibition of artworks that center on the ancient traditions of Halloween – harvest celebrations and remembrance of the dead – that reach back millennia. At the exhibition’s core is a series of large drawings that visually tell a story of a cat winding its way through trick or treaters, then a cemetery and then taking flight as a crow. The striking feature of the exhibition, however, is the use of technology to create the illusion of motion and depth on large prints as you walk past; a transparent, animated ghost halfway down the gallery’s stairway and a larger than life painting of the headless horseman upon a massive horse.
As a graphic design and illustrator, Walters has recently created life-sized paintings for permanent display at the Hauberg Museum for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency (temporarily displayed in Millennium Park in Chicago), political cartoons for the Quad City Times’ Editorial page; D-Day and Iwo Jima drawings for Springfield Armory; and artwork for several book and magazine covers. He also created more than a dozen websites, including a website for Public Works of Art in the Quad Cities in which Walters photographed and researched more than 100 public works.
Walters’ career in education began at Marycrest College in Davenport, Iowa where he assisted Alan Garfield in creating the first Bachelor of Arts program in computer graphics in 1984 (recognized by SIGGRAPH). He taught at Marycrest for twelve years, serving as Chairperson of the Communication and Fine Arts Division for six years before beginning to teach at Western Illinois University in 1997. He taught the first graduate art classes at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, IA for Western Illinois University in 2005. Walters has also taught computer art classes at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL.
