Ronald Watson Art and Art History Department Chair, Texas Christian University

BFA and MFA,

Ronald Watson, Professor of Art and Chair of Texas Christian University's Department of Art and Art History since 1994 also serves as the Director of the University Art Gallery.

A native of Nebraska who earned his BFA and MFA at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he has been teaching in higher education since 1967 and has administered two college level art programs since 1971. He also was the founder and Director of the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, Michigan from 1977 to 1982. Watson was a consultant to the Art in Public Places program of the National Endowment for the Arts 1975-79. In 1987 he was elected President of the National Council of Art Administrators.

He is an active artist who has been awarded an Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1975) and two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1977 and 1991). He has been a guest artist at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Ohio State University, and Lehman College in New York. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions in Michigan, Texas, Illinois and Florida and is in more than a dozen public and corporate collections including the Veterans Administration Hospital, Wood (Milwaukee), Wisconsin; Standard Oil, Inc., Chicago and the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C. Watson has published one book and five exhibition catalogues.

His teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels is in a variety of studio disciplines including drawing, painting, design and color. He also offers seminars in art criticism and in art professions. Watson teaches in the TCU in Budapest program and has offered instruction in art criticism at universities in Peru and Mexico. At present, he is concentrating his efforts on explorations of digital imagery.