Tru Ludwig is a practicing artist and art historian who, since 1999, has taught printmaking, drawing, art history, and a masters’ degree level thesis class in art education at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. For four summers in a row he co-taught an immersive art history/literature course for MICA students called Nature and American Identity while hiking on the Appalachian Trail. For the past ten years he’s delighted in sharing art history with musician students at the Peabody Conservatory of Music of The Johns Hopkins University. He has also led seven art history tours internationally. In 2021–22, Ludwig worked as consultant and master printer, teaching National Gallery of Art curators and conservators how to create, etch, and print intaglio prints in preparation for and inclusion in the exhibition Aquatint: From its Origins to Goya. At the same time, Ludwig has been delighting Platemark podcast listeners with a thorough and passionate series of episodes offering a history of prints in the West. Ludwig served as artist-in-residence at the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, and three years as curator of the Seminary’s Dadian Gallery of the Luce Center for the Arts and Religion. For eighteen years, Ludwig exhibited at the Washington Printmakers Gallery in Washington, DC, and is a past president of the Print, Drawing & Photograph Society of the Baltimore Museum of Art. For five years just prior to and following the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Ludwig worked for the National Endowment for the Arts, making the arts accessible to people with disabilities.
Ludwig served as artist-in-residence at the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, and three years as curator of the Seminary’s Dadian Gallery of the Luce Center for the Arts and Religion. For eighteen years, Ludwig exhibited at the Washington Printmakers Gallery in Washington, DC, and is a past president of the Print, Drawing & Photograph Society of the Baltimore Museum of Art. For five years just prior to and following the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Ludwig worked for the National Endowment for the Arts, making the arts accessible to people with disabilities.
Tru Ludwig was born in 1959 and was raised in Des Moines, Iowa. He earned his BA in studio art and art history, with a minor in music history, from St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN; an MA in art history from The George Washington University in Washington, DC; and an MFA in printmaking and drawing from Towson University, MD.
In his studio practice, Ludwig focuses on large-scale woodcuts and multi-plate etchings. His work has been shown on four continents and is included in numerous permanent collections across the US, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, Georgetown University, St. Olaf College, and the Charles City Arts Center in his home state of Iowa.
When Ludwig isn’t working with college students, he’s restoring his Victorian-era rowhome as a printmaking/gallery center called The Purple Crayon, or unwinding by bicycling and kayaking.
He places a premium on being an interdisciplinary connectivist both in the classroom and in the studio, thus his principle modus operandi is to make art history relevant to present-day students of all ages.
