Theodore Clement Steele – Indiana's Master Impressionist from Munich to Brown County – Part One

Over the Hill, 1914, T. C. Steele
in both 1926 and 2026 memorial exhibits 

 

Apex at the Center.

One hundred years ago, in 1926, a memorial exhibit for an original Indiana art legend and founding Hoosier Group painter Theodore Clement (T.C.) Steele occurred in the winter months just past his summer death that year. The John Herron Institute of Art in Indianapolis hosted the event on that somber occasion so many years ago.

To mark 100 years since his death, and that original career-spanning show of his work, the largest memorial exhibit of T. C. Steele's work since that time is now at the Brown County Art Gallery in Nashville, Indiana.  

Theodore Clement Steele – Indiana's Master Impressionist from Munich to Brown County is on view from July 18 through September 21, 2026, sponsored by Bob and Barbara Stevens.

Seventy works in total, in a blockbuster show of important works.  Created first as a young student of art, then through his Munich, Germany studies period. Later, his long portraiture phase and works upon returning to Indiana and living in Indianapolis. And finally, the impressionist works, for which he is most known and revered, created in Brookville and southeast Indiana around the turn of the last century and finally in Brown County until his death in July, 1926.

To recognize with certainty Steele's standing as a foundational and pivotal figure in Indiana's art history, one need only attend the show and examine the numerous works he created over this span of about fifty years. The works really say it all and speak for Steele – his talent, his hard work, his vision and his singularity.  

The exhibition is not to be missed. It is an extraordinary survey of great works, among his best.

Large ambitious salon pieces glowing with light and color, many with esteemed exhibition histories. Smaller dark and turbulent studies of brooding weather or fog. Each painting tells a tale or sings a song, with a repeating chorus of an overwhelmingly beautiful natural world.

Too many wonderful things to take in all at once. The exhibition almost demands repeat visits.

Meridian Street, Thawing Weather, 1887, T. C. Steele
exhibited at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1888 and
current Brown County Art Gallery exhibit

Aside the individual story of each picture, taken as a whole, they speak of Steele's eye for transcendent beauty, but also his enlivened soul. 

His paintings are stirring, you feel them. They evoke emotion. They record a virtuosity of the brush in his hand, as trembling as the wind, as scattered as the light and air, as centered and firm as the earth beneath his feet. One can sense the skill of his knowing glance, the speed of his decisions at the easel. 

Standing before his works, one experience his colors, our colors, our familiar Indiana. And looking at his dashing strokes, you feel his delight and joy and it becomes your joy as well.

No change in the weather or season was too fleeting or minute to elude his keen observation and deft handling of paint. 

Altogether, he paints a symphony as grand as Beethoven. In this grand exhibit, a record of a life's work second to none in the history of our state.

His history as an artist in Indiana perhaps heralded the end of the beginning of the pioneer days and styles of earlier artists, and the beginning of his own art, a blending of European innovations with the light and color unique to our region. 

T. C. Steele would affect the appreciation of art in our state.  He would have a founding influence on not only a region's art, western art as it was called at the time, but also art education in Indianapolis. 

His presence and talent would be the  formative lifeblood of the entire Brown County Art scene. His artworks and his noble example inspired those around him in life, and have sparked generations of artists since his passing.  

To round out our understanding of the man, T. C. Steele, the context of a career so overwhelming in its thorough presentation in the show, we can also look to the last few years of his life, the end of the beginning of the Indiana art we all know today.

Under a Brilliant Sky, 1915, T. C. Steele
in current Brown County Art Gallery exhibit

Proven by His Pictures.

On Memorial Day 1920, Indianapolis Star art writer, Lucille E. Morehouse, described her journey and visit to T. C. Steele's home and studio in Brown County, Indiana. Some of her picturesque remarks about the memorable day are as follows,

“It was blue skies overhead, the fresh green of May-time on the hill and meadow, and joy in the heart of each occupant of the little motor omnibus that sped along the hill road from Bloomington to Belmont...to a range of hills where you go up and up to the highest hill of all, where you follow the road along thickly-wooded  sloping sides and then follow the curve around a level stretch until you suddenly lift  up and astonished eye to an unexpected upward slope, to a flower-crowned summit  and the House of the Singing Winds.

...It was my pleasure to spend a few days at the House of the Singing winds last October. The place was taking on the color of autumn – that color which Mr. Steele has painted into so many pictures. The beauty of it then brought great delight and invigoration. But now – oh, what joy to be there at Iris time! In the time of the blooming of the rose and purple columbines!

...Mrs. Steele has planned and planted with such thoughtful care that the tints and shades afford as lovely harmonies and as pleasing contrasts as do the color tones on the canvas of the artist. It seemed as if all the iris in the land had opened its buds on either side of the driveway from the front entrance – wonderful clear blue blossoms waving like silken banners from their tall stalks; and there were velvety deep purple ones, and rich yellow and maroon, and deep cream, and pale lavender...”

Morehouse is quoted at length to provide an eyewitness account to the beauty to be seen and the joy to be felt at Steele's Brown County house and studio at the time. It is the exact same iris season, just one year earlier, that Steele painted, that same flowered driveway, in a wonderful canvas that is included in the current Brown County Art Gallery show – The Iris Road, 1919. 

The painting was chosen for the postcard and catalog of works that accompany the current Brown County Art Gallery Exhibit. 

As Steele painted, and as Morehouse described, the work shows an uplifting, curving drive through cascades of iris on either side, blooming in those creams and yellows and maroons and purples.  

In the same article, Morehouse describes another nearby scene captured by Steele in his paintings, one such magnificent example appearing in the current Brown County show,

“Adolph Shulz, whose studio is at Nashville, led a short walk through an uncleared part of the estate, the path leading down to the little stream in the ravine which has suggested compositions for several well-known winter landscapes that have been frequently exhibited.”

Morehouse may have been indeed been thinking of the large work, Winter Sunlight, 1912, created in the first year of Steele's full-time residency at his Singing Winds Belmont property. The piece was widely exhibited in its day, at the Cincinnati Art Museum, the annual Society of Western Artists exhibit, the John Herron Art Institute and in Richmond, Indiana.  

Winter Sunlight, 1912, T. C. Steele
in Dec. 4, 1926, Indianapolis News

This painting was also seen in the original Steele memorial show in Indianapolis at Herron Institute, as an Indianapolis News article on December 4, 1926, attests with its accompanying photograph.

Mystery of the Hill Country.

Lucille Morehouse describes a painting by Steele, perhaps much in the same mysterious style of a prize winning work that included in the current show. It was a painting called From the Hilltop that was exhibited in the 19th Indiana Artists exhibition at the Herron Institute in late winter of 1926. Her March 6, Indianapolis Star article describes the work, 

“From the Hilltop contains the misty poetry of the hill country. A tree-clad and swiftly sloping foreground bears away toward faint and distant ridges. Mr. Steele has sacrificed color for the veiled and gentle beauty of his surroundings”

That same veiled and misty poetry is seen in the large prize-winning canvas, The Hill Country, 1913, which was also on display that late winter of 1926, but in Chicago, at the 2nd Hoosier Salon exhibit. Shown there, as The Hill Country –  Brown County, it won the Best Indiana Landscape by an Indiana Resident and a $200 prize in that show. Its image, title and winning ways are documented in the March 8, 1926 Indianapolis News.    

The Hill Country, 1913, T. C. Steele
widely exhibited from 1914 through 1926

The Hill Country presents a similar muted and ever so slightly stylized and modern approach to landscape that stands apart in the current show. There is a dreamy handling to the background that seems a subtle nod to if not expressionism, then at least symbolism, as practiced by younger local artists of the time such as Dorothy Morlan and Clifton Wheeler. 

Fine detail in the foreground and the haze of suggested space toward the back. Perhaps there was a wildfire or a burning going on the area on that sunny day, but whatever the case, or whatever Steele's reason, the resulting picture is stunning.

A painting by Steele of a similar subject but clearly a separate and distinct work, in the Indiana State Museum collection, was included in the 2024 exhibition Stories of the Salon that celebrated the 100th year of the Hoosier Salon. 

That exhibition showed a painting it claimed to be The Hill Country, a winner at the 2nd Hoosier Salon. However, the painting exhibited in 1926 in Chicago, and shown in The Indianapolis News that year, and now on display at the Brown County Art Gallery, is not the same painting that was in the State Museum show last year. 

The Hill Country (?), T. C. Steele
was exhibited in Stories of the Salon, 2024, Indiana State Museum

As Steele had only one painting called The Hill Country in 1926 at the Hoosier Salon, according to the reference book Grand Tradition (aka green book) by Newton and Weiss that documents the Hoosier Salon from 1925 – 1990, we must conclude that both the State Museum piece and the current Brown County Art Gallery piece cannot both be the 1926 prize winner.  

Part Two will discuss the discernible periods of Steele's long career and ponder his working methods in examination of the many works included in the current Brown County Art Gallery show, Theodore Clement Steele – Indiana's Master Impressionist from Munich to Brown County.

Mark Diekhoff, July 2026

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

The First Public Sculpture of James Wille Faust

Arch, James Wille Faust

Wille in the Wild.

Within a few days of each other earlier this month, I came across two works by James Wille Faust from the early 2000s. First I stumbled across a framed print of his at the Southport Antique Mall on the city's south side, and then a few days later, when going to the Peg Fierke's show at Herron Galleries, I couldn't help but see his public sculpture at a corner outside the art school. 

What struck me was the close relation of the vocabulary of imagery and color between the two pieces – triangles, circles, arcs, teardrop shapes and bright poster colors. A little research revealed that the two works were indeed related in time and impulse, and to a concurrent event, the relocation of the Herron School of Art and Design from 16th Street to the IUPUI campus (as it was called at the time).

A Sculpture is Born.

In February 2003, Faust had an exhibition at the Domont Studio Gallery near the Eli Lilly campus on the city's near south side. The show was called Earth Air Fire and Water and contained both new paintings and sculptures and was previewed by S. L. Berry in The Indianapolis Star on February 3.

The art feature writer discussed the show with both Faust and gallery owner, John Domont, in a long pictorial column that discussed the inspiration for the paintings, and a background to Faust's 3D works included in the show. Berry relays Faust's explanation that preparation for the paintings began with sketching clouds, quoting the artist, 

“While I was drawing, a horizon line came into play...Then the shapes started working together. I began moving the horizon line forward and the cloud shapes back. I tried out different arrangements.”  

Berry writers further,

“To the shapes, Faust then began adding patterns. By the time he began painting, what he had created was a series of images that evoke the elements, sometimes individually, sometimes in various combinations. 

...The pieces...display his love and concern for the natural world.”

Again, Berry quotes Faust,

“From the cloud shapes, I started working with plumes...That led me to think about fires...Pretty soon, I realized that what I was dealing with were the elements.”

The article provides background to the sculptural works,

“In addition to the paintings, Earth Air Fire and Water features several sculptures. Actually models for larger-scale works that Faust dreams of constructing someday, they incorporate some of the same shapes and patterns that appear in the paintings.

Though he has earned a reputation as a painter, Faust majored in sculpture as an undergraduate at Herron...(class of 1971).”  

Faust is photographed peering through the negative space of one such model that appears of an overall horizontal design.

When looking at Faust's work from this show, it is hard not to think of Robert Indiana and his colorful, if not pop, signage-inspired works that often include circles and triangles and arrows. But whereas Indiana often imposed words and images to jar the emotions, and confront placidity, in the otherwise somewhat staid geometric compositions, Faust's abstractions with neo-geo colors and shapes seem an opposite performance. Although they are incredibly brightly colored, there is a soothing pattern to his shapes and harmony to his hues, as they distribute across his surfaces.  

A year later, Faust would have another show in October 2004, again at Domont Studio Gallery, Painting and Building Visions.  A September 9 preview in The Indianapolis Star included an image of Faust's Being Part of the Moment, which was included in that show.

And one year following, in an A&E (Arts and Entertainment) section front page that featured news of Herron's move to the IUPUI campus, S. L. Berry covered Faust's dream come true, with the permanent installation of his large-scale outdoor piece Arch.

Appearing in the May 29, 2005, Indianapolis Star, Berry's article begins,

“For James Wille Faust, the payoff came when a young girl leaned out of a passing car and yelled, 'Hey, that's cool!' 

She was referring to Arch, a 20-foot-tall brightly-colored aluminum sculpture that Faust and a work crew had just spent eight hours installing on cold, windy day. The sculpture, which stands outside the new Herron School of Art and Design...is Faust's first permanent piece of public sculpture.”

Berry explains the genesis of the piece, which cost $145,000 for fabrication and installation,

“Faust...has been creating maquettes (models) of sculptures he'd like to build for several years. When Valerie Eickmeier, Herron's dean, saw some of them in an exhibition, she asked if he'd be interested in creating a full-scale piece for installation in front of the art school's new facility...”   

Originally, additional outdoor pieces by local, national and international artists were placed around the grounds of the new building in a temporary invitational exhibit. Artists included Herron faculty members Greg Hull, Eric Nordgulen and Katrin Asbury. Other artists included Tom Otterness, Don Gummer, Judith Shea and Wim Delvoye. Those pieces were up for 18 months, whereas Arch remains to this day.

Time Capsules, Either Way.

Both antique malls and public art spaces share the characteristic of preserving the past. They both seem a counterweight to the inexorable heft of time's push forward. 

And so, James Willie Faust's Arch stands today as it did 21 years ago at the corner of Blackford and New York streets. 

Physically, it presents as nearly new, still fresh and eye-catching, a monument to not only Faust's vision, but the fabrication techniques or the expertise of its maintenance. And perhaps, also as a monument to Herron's arc in time, from 16th Street to IU Indianapolis.

Being Part of the Moment, a signed, 3/4 printers proof  copy, similarly, is well preserved under its glass within its frame. It loses something being amid all the homely clutter of the antique mall booth. But it is easy to imagine it more free and less confined, in its natural element, with some adequate light and a modicum of plain wall around it.

Being Part of the Moment, James Wille Faust

Mark Diekhoff, July 2026 

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

Irvington Artist Alson E. Wrentmore – A Life of Religion, Politics and Art

(no title given), A. E. Wrentmore, 1953

Arrival, Education and Extant Works.

Alson E. Wrentmore was born in 1872 near Cleveland, Ohio. As a young man, he would graduate from Hiram College in Northeast Ohio, and then study at the University of Chicago. 

His obituary in The Indianapolis Star on August 13, 1959, explains the middle years of his life before his arrival  to the Indianapolis area,

“(Wrentmore) held pastorates in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Kansas, and Oklahoma...and spent about ten years as an evangelist in the Central States.

He later served as school superintendent at several northwestern Indiana towns and wrote seven books on English which were widely used.

(He was)...an outspoken foe of intemperance, and served as a president of several organizations, including The Landlords and Tenants League, The American Property Owners and Christian Dry Crusaders.” 

As he was nearing age fifty, in December 1920, Wrentmore bought a house in Irvington on the east side of Ritter Avenue north of University Avenue. 

From about 1925 to 1929, part-time, he would pursue a master's degree from Indiana University, Bloomington. 

Within a year of earning that degree, as he approached age sixty, he would begin pursing state-wide political office seeking election to the office of Superintendent to Public Education on the third party ticket, the Prohibition Party, in 1930. 

We learn Wrentmore was also an artist, when he entered and was accepted for exhibition at the 24th Indiana Artists show at John Herron Art Institute in 1931. 

Other Irvington and Indianapolis artists who were in that year's exhibition, many of whom have been covered elsewhere in this blog, are Simon P. Baus, Constance Forsyth, William Forsyth, Marie Goth, John Wesley Hardrick, Cecil Head, Emma B. King, Dorothy Morlan, Isaac Lane Muse, Frederick Polley, Robert Selby  Oakley E. Richey, Elmer Taflinger, Lucy M Taggart, Clifton Wheeler, Hilah Wheeler and Charles Yeager.

Old Sugar Camp, A. E Wrentmore

Wrentmore's picture in the 24th annual show is not described in the press at the time. However, we do know that he was also represented in the 25th Indiana Artists exhibit the very next year, 1932, because a photograph of his actual painting (and its reverse side label) can be viewed on Ebay, where the work is offered for sale. 

The Old Sugar Camp depicts a winter landscape scene of a rudimentary A-frame shelter at a work site at a wood's edge. 

A  dormant field stretches beyond the encampment to a faraway white farmhouse on the horizon. 

The drab color scheme is the maybe the point of the painting –  depicting what? – maple sugaring and a hint of sweet warmth in the dead of winter? 

Another painting by A. E. Wrentmore can be found online. (image top of page) 

Untitled, it is described as dated (and purchased) 1953, and shows a bend of road or river, you be the judge, in the fall colors of a hilly landscape. 

The painting, if the date is accurate, was painted when Wrentmore was past 80 years old, and displays a more dreamy, folky style than the earlier work. 

Politics, Painting, Tragedy and Poetry.

Wrentmore was a man of many passions, as newspaper coverage attests over the following decades of his life. 

Prohibition Party politics was a focus his entire time in the Indianapolis area. He continued to run unsuccessfully as a candidate for U.S. Senator in 1932, Indiana Secretary of State in 1934, U.S. Congress in 1950 and Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction in both 1956 and 1958. (The last campaign being just one year before his death.)  

In the 1940s, Wrentmore's shared  passions of politics and painting were joined by poetry. 

The Indianapolis Star reports in January 1945 that he gave a talk as a member of a group called The Poet's Rendezvous, to others in the group of  40 poets from counties around Indiana,  on “the choice of poetic words.”  The same event featured Miss Florence Marie Taylor speaking on “correct rhyming.”

A September gathering of the same group, affiliated with the Indiana Federation of Poetry Clubs, was held at the Indianapolis YMCA, and featured  a  portrait of the group's president, Miss June Winona Snyder, painted by A. E. Wrentmore.

A later annual convention of the group held that year at the World War Memorial Building in Indianapolis, featured another talk by Wrentmore, titled Sources of Inspiration for Writing Poetry.

That Wrentmore continued painting can be surmised more from public notice columns in the local papers than from seeing examples in exhibitions reported at the time. He rarely is at auction or hanging in museums today. 

Wrentmore's death was announced with the obituary on August 13, 1959, mentioned above.  He died at his longtime home in Irvington on Ritter Avenue where “he maintained a studio for landscape painting ” according to The Indianapolis Star.

Just a month later, in September, auctioneers L. C. Chandler and Marley Neal would hold a sale of “all oil paintings by Mr. Alson E. Wrentmore, deceased,” along with frames and other furnishings from his studio. The public auction was held September 30, and the terms were cash.

As a historical Irvington footnote, a tragic event in Wrentmore's life is that his daughter would lose her life at the hands of her husband in 1932, around the time of  the elder Wrentmore's U.S. Senate campaign and exhibition at the Indiana Artists shows. 

Both his daughter and son-in-law were former Irvington residents who had relocated to Illinois to pursue teaching careers. 

The sensation of the murder, arrest, trial and sentencing would fill the pages of Illinois and Indiana papers over the following months and year. The effect of such a monstrous occurrence on his art and poetry remains unknown and unreported in public sources of information.

Mark Diekhoff, July 2026

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

Peg Fierke Art – Part Five

Double Silt Experiment, 2000, Peg Fierke

A Tribute to the World.

Peg Fierke's mature career works, most all, are inspired by a natural environment.  An environment of interrelation and interconnection.  A colorful, beautiful tapestry of pattern and form.  She will never tire of its complexity, We see a delight captured by her eye, and woven into her images. Neither brevity nor boredom are ever contained in her work. 

Often her drawings, prints and paintings are almost entirely abstracted from the nature of their origin though. Symbol is devoured by suchness, label by layers.  

Small things are shown large. Things are displaced and move here to there. Scattered things come together. Gathered things split apart. Things multiply or simplify. 

Dimensions collapse, eons of time become instant, before and after are marginalized, the now is the moment of her works. 

Evolving Emphasis.

The December 28, 1989 North Vernon (IN) Plain Dealer previewed an upcoming exhibition in Columbus, Indiana for the following weeks. The short article explained,

“The Indianapolis Museum of Art – Columbus Gallery presents ...Artists Who Are Women...

The show includes a selection of contemporary paintings and sculptures...(that)...emphasize the many ways in which women have expanded the traditional imagery of contemporary American art. 

The exhibition is curated by Holliday T. Day, IMA curator of contemporary art... ”

The article describes some of the artists and the expanded themes,

“Works by Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff and Lynda Benglis emphasize the role pattern and decoration in art. Paintings by Hollis Sigler and Darinka Novitovic explore the power of personal dreams, while the works by Vija Celmins, Daisy Youngblood, Jackie Ferrara and Peg Fierke explore interior life in a more meditative manner.” 

The Columbus (IN) newspaper, The Republic, ran a review and story on February 8, 1990, that mentions Peg's Fierke's contribution as one of the highlights, specifically an untitled work from 1989 described briefly as a charcoal “scribbling of lines and shapes.”

Just a month later, and continuing that spring, a barrage of newspaper articles would cover additional exhibitions and a symposium on women in the arts and related subjects taking place in Indianapolis.

Marion Garmel in her Brush Strokes column in The News was the first to provide background for the various related events, on March 29, 1990. It all began with the death of an artist, as she explained,

“Sylvia Kolyer was an East German refugee who came to Central Indiana in the 1970s and decided to pursue a career in art...(She) ...graduated...from the Herron School of Art...in 1981.

(She)...shared a studio for awhile in the Morris Building (later known as the Faris Building) before Kolyer's husband was transferred to (Kansas), where Kolyer promptly enrolled in the University of Wichita to work on a master of fine arts degree.

Then she was dead. At age 45, in 1986...(possibly) caused by the toxicity of the art materials she used.” 

The Garmel article discusses how Kolyer overcame various obstacles related to being a mother and wife, and a student and artist, raising two young children and living in small town Indiana. Nevertheless, she was able to carve out a niche, to make room, to follow her dream of a fine arts career. 

Kolyer had tasted success and made friends while in Indiana despite the brevity of her stay.

The article quotes Linda Haas, director of women's studies at IUPUI, about the genesis of the planned tribute exhibition for Kolyer and related events,

“...Sylvia herself obviously touched a lot of people very deeply while she was here. 

Some were collectors of her art. Some had her in class. She left such an influence on them that they were happy...(to organize and present the events)...as a testimonial to her and to Indiana women's contributions.”

Garmel elaborates on the various events planned,

“Somewhere along the way, the planning committee decided that instead of simply having a Kolyer memorial exhibit, they would turn the whole thing a celebration and serious study of women artists.”

A solo show of Kolyer's painting would be held at the Executive Conference Center at IUPUI.  

Border Crossing: Indiana Women and Art, a juried exhibit of work by present and former Indiana residents would be held at Gallery of Frame Designs on Massachusetts Avenue, and would include work by Kolyer and 17 other artists. 

Women artists on the planning committee excluded themselves from the Border Crossing show. But many were gathered in a show called Indiana Women Artists: An Invitational Show at Editions Ltd. on the north side. 

Since Peg Fierke was on the planning committee, she was represented in the Editions Ltd. show.

Finally, author, artist, teacher Suzi Gablik would be a keynote speaker at the symposium and discuss her two books; The Re-enchantment of Art and Has Modernism Failed?

Additional speakers presented talk topics including; Is There a Feminist Aesthetic?, Women in the Arts Curriculum, Making Art a Priority in Our Lives, Collecting, Exhibiting and Selling Women's Art in Indiana, and Women Weaving Visions: Women's Art as Spiritual Transformation. 

In a Weekend Section front page feature by Steve Mannheimer, in the April 6, Indianapolis Star, he reviews the Border Crossing show and also discusses author Gablik's views about an evolving art worldscape at the time,

“Gablik, in a telephone interview from her home in Virginia, said that her main thesis is that modern culture is 'moving out of the modern industrial era into an ecological era.'

That move is accompanied by 'a shift in world view that is basically going to affect our whole values system.'  and which will highlight the fact that our culture has 'no collective project.'

Gablik said that the past few decades have witnessed the 'breakdown of the model of the artist as a solitary hero working outside of society.' That stereotype was 'transformed into the model of the professional artist getting his slides and CV...in order to attract curators and critics.'

Gablik offers the next step that evolution: Artists who embrace 'compassionate action that intervenes directly into the world and helps to heal it.' ”     

On April 11, in The News, Marion Garmel reviews Indiana Women Artists: An Invitational Show which was also curated by Holliday T. Day. 

Peg Fierke was invited and participated in the exhibit, about which Garmel writes,

“Peg Fierke's intriguing tear-shaped patterned paintings, where larger and larger patterns emerge from the divisions in the smaller ones.”

(A large charcoal drawing from around this period is below)

Cytophenocrysts, 1991, Peg Fierke, charcoal

On April 22, Steve Mannheimer's column in The Star would cover the same show. Although he does not discuss Fierke's work with specification, he does write her paintings and those by other artists in the show “...offer solid, thoughtful, emotionally resonant experiences.” 

For the duration of the 1990s and forward, Fierke would continue to exhibit and also act as a curator and juror for shows and lecture on art.  

This latter period of her career, although less easy to follow in an ever diminishing art coverage in newspapers, is where her current retrospective exhibition picks up, showing many works from about 1995 through the 2000s.

An Unfinished Retrospective.

A survey of art produced over the career of the late Margaret D. 'Peg' Fierke is currently on display in the Marsh Gallery at Herron School of Art and Design. 

Evidence of Things Unseen shows a variety of techniques, primarily drawing, painting and printmaking. The exhibition statement that accompanies the show emphasizes not only her art and its influences, but also the artist and her association as a teacher of printmaking at Herron for nearly four decades. To quote the statement directly,

“This exhibition offers an opportunity to encounter both the remarkable body of work she created, and the lasting impact of a life dedicated to curiosity, experimentation, and creative inquiry.”

The show is limited to works that were in the artist's studio and estate, so it does not include any works borrowed from public or private collections. Perhaps a more comprehensive Peg Fierke retrospective will be organized in the future to include some of her remarkable works owned by Newfields and other private and public collections. 

(Fierke's beautiful painting What Goes Around is in the Richmond Art Museum collection, image here) 

It would be amazing to see more of the large colorful paintings and early works on paper, and sculptures, described in the art press over the years. 

Until such time, we must relish what is presented in the Herron Galleries show.

It includes an assortment of sketches, doodles, and more refined drawings, as well as etchings and mixed media works – presented loose and unframed on low display tables in the center of the room. 

Among the items are the original copper plates, first engraved then etched, for Module/Mass (discussed earlier) and the beguiling Asymmetrical Self, 1999, now in the Newfields collection (see here).    

Besides the stunning color in the painting Double Silt Experiment (top of page and discussed below), the exhibit is a study in monochrome, showcasing many large graphite and charcoal works, including  Monads and Antinomy, both charcoals from 1995, and the massive undated horizontal, Rock Wall #1, pencil and charcoal. 

As previously mentioned, these are mostly pieces from Fierke's latter career from about 1995 forward. Three large works from the 2000s are astonishing in the ornate complexity they possess. Bone-like forms and outright partial skeletons are intrinsic to these pieces. 

Double Silt Experiment (detail), Peg Fierke

Double Silt Experiment, 2000, oil on canvas, seems to imagine life preserved, or at least the wonder of its essence captured and contained. 

It's not fossilization, but reorganization – experimentation. 

A large, dispersing rib cage form hangs suspended in sedimentary layers of green and brown. Is Fierke showing her own experiment? Or referencing the genesis of life itself from an intelligent design of clay and bone? Or something more personal, and individual to each viewer?

Maine Triangle, 2006, projects its masts upward amid a charcoal mosaic of organized chaos. Everything is everything is everything, we don't know why. 

Maine Triangle, 2006, Peg Fierke

A mystery of bones and a hand waving from the dark of a shelter or a boat. Some compartment of man-made straight lines, anyway. The world outside is of interrelated completion, primordial and whole.   

With the the large charcoal drawing, Fusion of Two Low Entropy Systems, 2006, Fierke seems to return to her earliest imaginings of a paradox or riddle, at least in the title. The name seems akin to her quirky early works which combined organic things with sterile industrial environments. 

Fusion of Two Low Entropy Systems, Peg Fierke

But then again, she always had a way with names.

It may be as simple as charcoal, the medium, and bone, the subject. Two stable substances that left on their own will remain as they are for a long time. Fusion is the action, the catalyst, the process. Fusion is the alchemy, the roll to the rock.    

One thinks, in looking at Peg Fierke's works and walking around her show, that she was a melder and a merger. Like Mother Nature, a consummate multi-tasker. Her many things of earth are stacked together, compressed together, on the surface of her pictures. Often  we don't know what we see, other than marvelous color, movement and form. With an infant's eyes, we wonder.

Beauty, for her, the flow of grain on wood, the bones within a skeleton. Allusions to other patterned mysteries like the pull of gravity, the effect of magnetism on iron shavings or a rainstorm's vibrating ripples on water. Universal multitudes, or separate things together, sublime. 

Her artworks are like the layers of of the earth that preserve a whole history of vibrant living in their rocky remnants.  Her works too, serve as record and mirror her many interests and fascinations. From spontaneous and joyful experiments to a tough virtuosity earned by a devotion to hard work, and everything in between. Its all there.

We see, lines and marks first noticed, then chosen, and put to paper. Finally, fully arranged, and look, they're alive. 

In Peg Fierke's work we see an artist with the intelligence of a lab technician, with with the eye and song of a poet, with the heart of healer and the stamina of a Marathon runner.  Breathing in, breathing out, one step then another, 26 miles later, voila...

(Title not Available) - postcard detail, Peg Fierke
from the exhibition Inside/Outside, 2016
Shircliff Gallery, Vincennes University

Mark Diekhoff, July 2026

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

Peg Fierke Art – Part Four

Face Gut Rhythm, 1989, Peg Fierke

World View Mirrors.

Peg Fierke would continue to create art and exhibit often during the latter 1980s and all through the 1990s and beyond.  In might be said, that in these years, the second half of her career forward from about 1985 on, she would create the works that are most signature of her name and art today.  

Works from this period possess a timelessness devoid of fad or fashion. Fierke has developed an organic intricacy all her own – regardless of medium – paint, graphite or ink.

Concurrent to her artistic evolution, the first rumblings of tectonic movement in the local art scene and the overall art world in the upcoming years and decades are first sensed, we imagine, and then seen. 

Issues-oriented art exhibitions and related symposiums would continue to register and occur with greater frequency in the local scene.

From about 1985 onward, exhibitions to draw attention to dangers of nuclear proliferation, the need for environment protection, the long overdue equal representation of women and minorities in the arts and other pressing issues were held at various venues in the city, both in private galleries all the way to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 

Perhaps new ideas would not necessary triumph over earlier approaches. Not at first. But the ideas would at least get their foot in the door, and once inside, make their presence heard. 

A 1986 show would introduce Indianapolis to the eye of Holliday T. Day, the first curator of contemporary art at the the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  She would curate the show, the 6th Indianapolis Art League Regional exhibit that fall.

Marion Garmel would cover the show in her September 25 Brush Strokes column in The Indianapolis News. The writer first discusses the parameters of the show, and then adds some of observations, as well advising of the prize winners, as follows, in part,

“The Art League Regional is open to artists residing within a 250-mile radius of Indianapolis, but is advertised mainly to area universities and art schools. 

That accounts for its trendiness and also, in a way, for its warmed-over New York look. Too many of the paintings smack of the East Village, say, or are bogged down in art history.”

Garmel cites a couple of works as examples of the type she characterizes in a somewhat dismissive way. The writer seems a bit at odds with the curatorial taste of Ms. Day, as she leads her article with those remarks, but does not really explain these feeling with any detail. 

Garmel does mention additional award winners such as  third prize for Eric Schuster's Figure with Carpet, and merit awards for and untitled figure-based oil by Ed Sanders and “Peg Fierke...for Octopus, an obsessively painted large oil of repeated dot-filled ovals.” 

The reader is left to wonder of all the works shown which ones Garmel considered warmed-over, bogged down, or something else altogether.

Just a couple of months later, Fierke along with Indianapolis painter Lois Main Templeton, would exhibit paintings at the Wilson Gallery of the Krannert Fine Art Center of Anderson College in Indiana. 

Here and There, Peg Fierke

Fierke is described in the preview/press release that appeared in the Anderson Daily Bulletin, December 7, 1986, as follows,

“...Fierke...believes an artist's work reflects his or her world view and serves as a mirror to help direct ...growth and change...

Fierke tries to use very few boundaries in her work. She works with a flexible means of expression to accommodate natural deviations and imperfections. Fierke's work also reflects a great amount of spontaneity, which comes as a result of the process of doing rather than preconception.”   

The article contains an image of Fierke's large oil on canvas included in the show, Here and There, and another blurb a few days later included an image of her oil painting, Huston St., also in the show.

Huston St., Peg Fierke

The following year, a show Peaceworks was mounted at Ruschman Art Gallery on Massachusetts Avenue. An Indianapolis News article on April 8, discussed the exhibit,

“Peaceworks (is) an exhibit dealing with the nuclear arms issue...Mark Ruschman, owner of the gallery, is donating space for the exhibit.

The hope is to raise $10,000 toward expenses of the June 28 Indianapolis Concert for Humanity at the Circle Theatre.

The concert itself is a donation and time and talent by central Indiana classical musicians in support of Indianapolis Nuclear Weapons Freeze and Indianapolis Physicians for Social Responsibility.”

Over 25 artists participated, including Peg Fierke.

News writer Garmel would again cover Peg Fierke the following year in her column of May, 20, 1987. The writer reviewed her two-person show with Karl F. Michel on Mass Ave at the time. She writes,

“431 Gallery, the 'alternative space' artists-cooperative gallery...continues to be the least polished of gallery spaces (on Massachusetts Avenue). But its current show of pastel drawings by Karl F. Michel and oil paintings by Peg Fierke...is one of its strongest. 

Fierke, who puts great dabs of paint all over her canvases, has moved from tiny leaf-like ovals to explosive patterns of large sail-like forms converging on one another.”

The following year, 1988, would bring three important exhibitions for Fierke in Indianapolis and the surrounding area.

Marion Garmel would again be the art columnist to cover the first show in question from that year, July's Omnibus Exhibit at Herron Gallery. Her July 14 column explains the rationale for the show, 

“Robert Roman, who has been temporary director of the (Herron) gallery and recently became permanent, decided that it would be beneficial for gallery-goers in Indianapolis to see how their own artists compare with artists in other parts of the country.

He also thought it would be nice to see a 'body of work' by each artists. Since most newcomers have yet to build a 'body of work,' he settled on established artists in 'mid-career.' ”

Artists from outside the area included Millie Wilson - Los Angeles, Herman Costa - New York and Barry Hehemann - Chicago and Rebecca Krinke - Boston. Area artists included Carl Pope, Ellie Siskind and Peg Fierke. 

Garmel considered the show as among the best in Indianapolis that year, and began her review generally speaking and then specifically about Fierke,

“It's an extremely strong exhibit, with as many different styles and visions as there are hours in a day.

The Indiana artists hold their own very well, thank you.

Most exciting is Peg Fierke...whose expansive canvases are ordered with patterns and lines and leaf shapes through which organic, growing forms emerge. With titles like Opulent Entropy and Spiral Jungle, they throb with color and life.”

The 34th Annual Drawing and Small Sculpture Show was presented at Ball State University a month or so later.  Artists from over 40 states entered for consideration of inclusion in the show, and twenty artists were chosen from the almost 400 entries by juror Charlotte Kotik, curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum in NYC.

Behavior Sediment, Peg Fierke

Fierke was among the twenty, and an image of her large oil crayon work, Behavior Sediment, from the show, was printed in both The Indianapolis Star on September 11, 1988 and Arts Indiana magazine in the October 1988 issue.

Another important exhibit to end Fierke's exhibition year in 1988 was the Indiana Directions '88 show at the Indianapolis Art League's Churchman-Fehsenfeld Gallery that fall.

It was again Marion Garmel who was to cover the show in the local press, and her article appeared in the September 28, Indianapolis News.  The show was a first for the venue, and Garmel explains the inception's conception in the opening lines of her article,

“The Indianapolis Art League had the great idea of stepping in when the Indianapolis Museum of Art dropped its big Indiana Artists Show by staging and Indiana Artists Show of its own. 

But the Indianapolis Art League is not the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It has neither the prestige, the space, nor the resources. 

So Indiana Directions '88, the competitive exhibit for Indiana artists...is a very nice but sparse show...”

Fierke was included, as were Omnibus artists Carl Pope, Pamela De Maris, and Ellie Siskind – and others including Mae Engron (covered elsewhere in the blog here), Ed Sanders (with his painting Torso, covered elsewhere in this blog, here), Valerie Eickmeier for her sculpture, Shark's Tooth, and James Wille Faust for his Best of Show award winner, Illusionist.

Garmel referred to Fierke's work only briefly under a section of  “familiar” works near the closing lines of her review, providing the name of Fierke's piece in the show, Radiomordmous. 

On the Side of Art and Earth.

The next year, Peg Fierke would move from 431 Gallery to a new art enterprise, Goldberg & Feldman Fine Arts, located on the city's north side. Her first show there, High Tolerance for Ambiguity, would be reviewed by Marcus Chandler in The Indianapolis Star, October 8, 1989.  In the review, Chandler also reviews the latest, then current, iteration of the Omnibus exhibit at Herron. 

Chandler contrasts the two exhibits, in so far as artistic motivations inherent in the artworks produced and shown, 

“All in one unsettling afternoon, I traveled...from one end of the artistic spectrum to the other, as I visited the Omnibus '89 exhibition and Peg Fierke's exhibition of paintings and drawings...

The 10 artists exhibiting...(in Omnibus '89) are highly intellectual and, for the most part, deadly serious painters, sculptors and photographers. Each of them uses his or her work to express a point of view.

Fierke, on the other hand, paints pictures that are beautiful. For her, art is an end unto itself. Fierke's paintings and drawings are not vehicles for expressing ideas.”

Thinking about the contrast he experienced, the writer goes on to explain his point of view, regarding the current contemporary art milieu. 

“Suggesting that someone's paintings are 'merely' aesthetically pleasing is damning criticism in many art circles. Art which is not coupled with a message is not 'serious,' so say some critics.

The energy and excitement Fierke invests in her paintings and drawings reveal commitment and purpose on a much higher plane than the high-minded sloganeering and posturing that all too often propels self-proclaimed 'serious art.' ” 

That Chandler is enthusiastic about Fierke's techniques and results is obvious, as he continues,

“Fierke creates frantic energy and movement in her paintings, a feat...challenging in abstract painting. 

She uses an elongated oval...to form patterns.  The repetition of the small figures and the slight differences among them makes her paintings appear to vibrate, often accelerated by Fierke's masterful sense of color.”

He describes two paintings in greater detail, Spiral Jungle and The Ritual, then sums up his observations about the lack of narrative in Fierke's work, despite some occasional referential imagery, observing,  “...it is clear that Fierke is not suggesting a narrative line or trying to drive home a point.” 

Chandler's remarks about Fierke's work and motivating factors seem valid. It's easy to recognize her and her generation as being a part of that mid-Century movement of artists in our city for whom abstraction was a respected foundation of an evolving modern art. The beautiful art for art's sake approach we see in not only Fierke, but Terry Steadham, Steve Redman and James Wille Faust, for examples, who also came of art school age in the '60s.

But back to Chandler and his article, he proceeds to write of the bi-polar shock at seeing Fierke's show first, and then the Omnibus exhibit, on the same afternoon,

“Leaving Fierke's visual playground for the Omnibus exhibit...is like leaving the arms of a sensuous lover to join William F. Buckley's Firing Line.

(In Omnibus,) One is assaulted on all sides by artists with an urgent story to tell.” 

Power Box, 1989, Peg Fierke

Chandler's review is especially helpful in covering Fierke's work in the late '80s, in that time of shifting tastes and oppositional forces in the overall art world. By way of his colorful criticism, he simplifies a nuanced amalgam of major trends and forces affecting the art world of the time to a mere couple of players, two easily understood factions. To a bout or contest, a war of wills, between archetypal energies, as he lays out – the lover and the fighter.  

A contest for, a conquest of, the hearts and minds of artists' brains, galleries' walls and the awestruck applause of the  audience, from that time until today. 

Indeed, as early as the following year, 1990, such a tussle would play out in a series of art shows and a symposium of talks and presentations that would explore these issues of art in great detail in our city, as we shall see in Part Five of this series to follow.  

Also in Part Five, Peg Fierke's later years as an artist through the lens of her current retrospective exhibit at Herron Galleries is discussed. The show has many examples of her work from the 1990s and 2000s and portrays  the substance of Fierke's lifelong efforts – her many years teaching, her lifetime of learning. Her career of creating her Evidence of Things Unseen.  

Mark Diekhoff, July 2026

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.