Dale Newkirk received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1984 from Ohio State University. His teaching career began at New Mexico State University in 1984 as a Professor of Sculpture. In addition he has taught at Indiana University and Southeastern Louisiana University since 2003. He is currently a Full Professor of Visual Arts, and the Head of the Department of Visual Art + Design and the Theatre Area at Southeastern. As an artist he works in sculpture, painting, and drawing in a non-representational visual language in a variety of materials and forms. Dale Newkirk’s artwork has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including exhibitions in major museums and galleries in the art centers of New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, El Paso, Santa Fe, Chicago, Madrid, Mexico City, and New Delhi. In addition, he has completed 5 large-scale public sculpture commissions. He has worked as an exhibition designer for the Chicago Children’s Museum, the former Tarra Museum of Art in Chicago, and the American Museum of Art in Giverny, France. Newkirk's artwork for the past 15 years has moved within a visual language of geometric forms, shapes, and most importantly color. This has evolved over time out of an interest in the internal relationships within the artwork, which are realized through an intuitive process of improvisation. As in Jazz, improvisation is a response to an internal structure in the music that is responded to, added on to, and then revised repeatedly to create the final form. In order to work intuitively, he invents something to respond to at the beginning of the process. This might be a series of lines, a grid, or a linear diagram, which is not a road map, but a starting point. The struggle is in getting the artwork to come together into a unified whole while at the same time having a visual presence. The wall-mounted constructions are made of common construction lumber and paint (Flashe). These sculptures are constructed, then cut apart and reformed, revealing surprising visual relationships and interior spaces. The sculptures are concerned with the problems of nonrepresentational painting, as well as issues inherent in contemporary sculpture. These objects have been informed by a tradition of post-minimalist artwork, and are concerned with scale, color, form, surface, texture, and architectural structure.