Richard Krogstad was born and raised in the small, Midwest farming community of Harlan, Iowa.

After graduating from the University of Iowa with a B.A. in art, he worked as an art director at Foote, Cone and Belding in Chicago and exhibited his artwork at the Gilman Gallery. Later, he completed an M.F.A. degree in painting at the University of Massachusetts and moved to Los Angeles where he exhibited at the Jodi Scully Gallery and began a career in graphic design.  Krogstad received many national and international awards for his work in this field.

After moving to Minneapolis and his native Midwest, he resumed his art vocation full time in 1992 and has had one person exhibits at the Plains Art Museum, Luther College, Groveland Gallery and the Minnetonka Center for the Arts among other venues. His work is in many collections including American Express, Bank of America, Cargill, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Mayo Clinic Health System, Midco, Park Nicollet and Wells Fargo. The U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies Program selected his paintings for loan to American ambassadors’ residences in Germany, Micronesia and Burma.

Art critic Mary Abbe of the Minneapolis StarTribune wrote of his work, “Krogstad is a poet of rural places, the wide skies arching over fallow fields, river valleys and farmsteads.”  Rusty Freeman, VP of Curatorial Education at the Plains Art Museum wrote, “He makes the ordinary elements of the landscape – fields, rivers, skies – extraordinary through the careful use of color and value, lending his landscapes a spiritual demeanor.”

Richard, his wife Christine and their cats Gracie and Annie, live on Big Stone Lake in the small, western Minnesota town of Ortonville. He taught landscape painting at the Minnetonka Center for the Arts where he learned far more from his students than they did from him.