Rita Argen Auerbach

Rita Argen Auerbach was an internationally recognized watercolor artist and educator who is represented in numerous museum, corporate, and private collections throughout the United States. Her award-winning paintings portrayed such subjects as Buffalo's architecture, the Chautauqua Institution's Victoriana, and landscapes inspired by extensive travel in this country and abroad. Auerbach's works are characterized by strong value contrasts created by light and shade using rich luminous transparent watercolor.

Her paintings were included in national and international juried exhibitions such as The Adirondacks National Exhibition of American Watercolors, Pennsylvania Watercolor Society, Montana Watermedia, Mid-Atlantic Regional Watercolor Exhibition, National League of American Pen Women, and the Erie and Niagara Landscape Exhibition in Dortmund, Germany. Rita was invited for a one-artist exhibition in The Academy of Art in Riga, Latvia.

Rita's paintings have been exhibited in Western New York at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Art Dialogue Gallery, Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Kenan Art Center, Big Orbit Gallery, Carnegie Art Center, Castellani Art Museum, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Chautauqua Center for the Visual Arts, and others.

Rita was born in Buffalo, as were her parents. She lived in the region her entire life, with the exception of four years spent in Morocco while her husband served in the US Navy. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in art education from the State University of New York College at Buffalo. A secondary art teacher for twenty years in the Clarence Central Schools and district art department chair, she was named Western New York Art Educator of the Year in 1993 and is listed in Who's Who Among America's Teachers.

Rita conducted painting excursion workshops in Costa Rica, France, Italy, and Spain. She served on the faculty of Chautauqua Institution Special Studies Program and was a delegate to the Chautauqua Institution/Eisenhower Institute Conference on U.S.-Soviet Relations in Riga, Latvia. Her sketches of the trip became the Conference's official gift to the Soviet Government and are published in Sketches and Reflections of a Journey. Articles about her painting techniques have been included in American Artist and Watercolor.

A Council member of the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, N.Y. and past president of the Buffalo Society of Artists, she is listed in Who's Who in American Art and Who's Who in America.

For the "Herd About Buffalo" public art project in 2000, Rita painted two buffaloes which helped raise $1.3 million dollars for Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the Burchfield-Penney Art Center.

(Source: http://www.meibohmfinearts.com/artists.aspx?ID=4, Accessed 12/21/2011)