Back From the Hike is a celebration of the work of three painters who met in the Tyler School of Art graduate painting program in the late 1970s: Royce Howes, Stephen Pentak, and Richard Roth. The exhibition is a tribute to their enduring relationship. Though having stylistically divergent practices, and living in different cities, they have remained close intellectually and spiritually, being each other’s critic and devotee, for forty-seven years. They are now exhibiting together for the first time.

The title of the exhibition derives from a camping trip the three artists embarked on as students. In honor of the three friends, their professor, David Pease*, titled one of his artworks, “Back from the Hike,” a tip-of-the-hat to Ellsworth Kelly, but also an acknowledgement of the return of Royce, Stephen, and Richard from the hike they took together to Old Rag Mountain in 1976.