Thomas Paquette (1958– ) earned his BFA degree in Painting at Bemidji State University, graduating summa cum laude in 1985. After that earned his MFA degree in Painting in 1988 from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, which he attended on a full graduate fellowship. Ever since his formal studies, he has worked full time as a painter, and now lives in Pennsylvania. His paintings have been featured in more than sixty solo exhibitions in museums and prominent galleries in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Washington DC and elsewhere. In 2018-2019, a large solo exhibition of his paintings, America's River Re-Explored – Paintings of the Mississippi from Source to Gulf traveled to Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Watermark Art Center, and Dubuque Museum of Art. In 2014-2015, a 70-painting exhibition of his works, On Nature's Terms, traveled to art museums in California, New York and Indiana (Wildling Art Museum, Quick Center for the Arts, and Evansville Museum of Art and Science). Other independent solo museum exhibitions of his paintings were mounted at Erie Art Museum, Georgia Museum of Art, The Rockwell Museum, and Westmoreland Museum of American Art. Early in his career Paquette was awarded a three-year residency/fellowship in Miami by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. He has also had residencies at other institutions, including the American Academy in Rome, the Aegean Arts and Cultural Exchange (Greece), and at U.S. national parks (Acadia, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain). His commissioned works in public and corporate collections include large paintings for Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Queen Mary II, and the states of Minnesota, Montana, and Maine. His paintings have been selected to hang in nineteen U.S. embassies on five continents, including in the cities of Rome, Brussels, Athens, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Taipei, and Santiago. You can visit Thomas' website to view more of his work here.