KINGSTON, R.I.– October 28, 2008 — The University of Rhode Island’s Library Gallery will exhibit work by artist/educator David Wheeler.

The watercolor exhibition, Primordial Tides: Sea Life in the Art of Prehistoric Peoples, is free and open to the public. It will be on display Nov. 2 through Nov. 30 at the University Library Gallery, URI/University Library, 15 Lippitt Rd., URI Kingston Campus. The gallery is open Sunday from 1 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.; Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.; Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

“My life-long interest in natural history fuels my work as an artist, science illustrator, and museum model maker,” explains Wheeler. “I have made life-sized dinosaur reproductions for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Osaka Museum of Natural History in Japan. I have made various other models for the Adirondack Museum, the University of Vermont, and the Museum of Afro-American History.”

Exhibitions of Wheeler’s paintings and drawings have been presented at the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institute’s Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland, The Palace of the King of Portugal, the New York State Museum, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, the Virginia Marine Science Museum, and other labs, universities, and learning centers.

Wheeler has been a teacher and practicing artist for 25 years, instructing at colleges in New York and Massachusetts. He currently teaches at the State University of New York’s Empire State College, at Russell Sage College, and at the Pratt Institute Center Extension Campus at Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute.

As an artist in the schools, he has worked in 28 Eskimo, Haida, Athabascan, Aleut, Aleutik, and Guichen villages for the Alaska State Arts Council. He has written of his work and his Iceman Project in Art Education, the journal of the National Art Teachers Association.

For more information about the exhibition, call 401.874.2672.