Craig Blietz
Craig Blietz (b. 1956) lives and works in northeast Wisconsin. He is recognized for his
work representing American rural landscape and pastoral life.
Blietz is a graduate of the University of Denver (Bachelor of Science, 1981) and
Harrington College of Design (Associates Degree, 1990). His academic training in art
continued from 1992 to 1996 at the School of Representational Art in Chicago, Illinois.
Blietz also studied privately with Chicago figurative artist Fred Berger, Chicago portrait
artist Richard Halstead, and Chicago painter, printmaker, and illustrator John Rush.
Travels in Europe and throughout the United States enhanced Blietz’s knowledge and
skills in animal and landscape painting.
Blietz has had twenty-four solo exhibitions and has exhibited widely in museums in
Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Retrospective exhibitions of his work
were shown in 2002 at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin; 2013 at the Miller Art
Museum in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin; and in 2020 at the Wausau Museum of
Contemporary Art in Wausau, Wisconsin. In 2018 Blietz’s body of work entitled Herd
was featured in a solo exhibition in the main gallery of the Museum of Wisconsin Art in
West Bend, Wisconsin. His works appear in printed form in three full exhibition catalogs
and in a substantial 12” x 12” hardcover book entitled Craig Blietz: Eight Years of
Pastoral Dreaming published in 2013.