“Pearson’s Pond,” by Tom Russell, will be one of the featured works in “60 Years! Three Dedicated Artists, Teachers and Friends,” which opens Sunday at Baker University.

Three longtime artists whose works have spanned more than a half-century each will be featured in an exhibit starting Sunday at Baker University.

Tom Russell, Baldwin City; Will Niewald, Kansas City, Mo.; and Bob Sudlow, Lawrence, will have paintings included in “60 Years! Three Dedicated Artists, Teachers and Friends.” There will be an opening reception from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at the Holt-Russell Gallery in Baldwin City.

The three artists have been friends since the 1940s.

“There’s a driving force in each of these men that is truly inspiring,” says Walt Bailey, special assistant to the BU president. “Even in their 80s and 90s they continue to take supplies out on location to work. They work as plein air painters, seeing light and color directly and making visual discovery central in what they do.”

Russell studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute and taught at BU from 1963 until 1982. The university’s gallery bears his name.

Niewald’s paintings are in numbers public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. In 2006, he received a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and previously held guest-teaching residencies at institutions such as the New York Studio School and Yale University.

Sudlow is considered one of the most important landscape painters in the Midwest. His teaching career included being a faculty member at Kansas University from 1971 to 1987. He was named Kansan of the year in 1997 by Native Sons and Daughters of Kansas.