Artist Profile - William Ahrendt

This museum is fortunate to have some fantastic artists represented in the collection. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes some artists tend to get more recognition than others. Over the coming months, this blog will attempt to highlight some of the artists in the collection which you may not typically hear a lot about at the museum.

This week's feature is on William Ahrendt. Ahrendt was born in Cleveland, OH in 1933. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art and a Masters degree in Art History from Arizona State University. Early on in his career, Ahrendt had the good fortune of spending 11 years in Europe, mostly in Germany on a European Study Scholarship from the Cleveland Institute of Art. During his time in Germany, he attended the Munich Academy of Creative Art where he studied painting techniques of the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

Ahrendt returned to the United States in 1968 and settled in Arizona, where he still resides. He became the Art Department Chairperson at Glenndale Community College. He held this job until 1979 when he retired so he could focus more on his fine art career. Over the years, Ahrendt has been a contributing editor to "Arizona Highways" - a magazine devoted to travelogues and artistic photographs of Arizona. His paintings and articles have been published in over 40 issues of the magazine.

Ahrendt loves history, which is relfected in his artwork. He is known for painting the "Old West" in an "Old World" style. In "The Bullwhackers" at the Booth Museum, Ahrendt portrays 3 cowboys driving a team of oxen across a river. The oxen are pulling a rather large covered wagon. In the background, a rainbow is visible a amidst a dark sky and rain. While most people tend to think of horses pulling wagons, it was not unusual for oxen to be used for very heavy loads. They may have been slower than horses, but the oxen were much stronger. The "Bull Whackers" are the cowboys. They are cracking whips above the oxen to encourga them to keep moving through the water - they did not use the whips to hit the animals.