The Art of Carla Knopp - Part Three

Morning On Earth, Carla Knopp

In Vivo Cross-Fertilization.

Part Two ended with Carla Knopp's show of oil painting portraits in June 1991 at Artigliography, a gallery located at 415 Massachusetts Avenue, in a group show called Oils, Prints and Holography. That date was just a month after the planned, but canceled, exhibit of the her same works at the Hindman Gallery, which closed suddenly at the end of April.

By summer's end, Bill Adkin's formerly of 431 Gallery and most recently, Hindman's, would hang a shingle again on Mass Ave, again at the address 431, but upstairs. Steve Mannheimer, in his weekly arts column, Visual Arts, in The Indianapolis Star, would re-introduce Adkins and the launch of his latest venture in an article on September 1, 1991,

“Named the In Vivo Galley, it is the latest – maybe the last for a long time – project of art maven and once-and-future gallery director Bill Adkins.

   Last March, Adkins announced that he had persuaded his employer, Marge Hindman, to expand her Geist Reservoir gallery to include a branch showroom above the 431 Gallery along the city's Downtown art spine.

   A month later, and barely 24 hours before Hindman, Adkins and the landlord were to ink the contract, Hindman's lawyer departed the world – and took the deal with him.

   Hindman found a new lawyer. He didn't think much of Adkin's idea. The deal fell from limbo into perdition.

   While she was at it, Hindman decided to close that half of her gallery devoted to contemporary art – the half where Adkins worked.”

As it would turn out, Adkins, with wife Julie, decided to seek financing and open In Vivo themselves. As Mannheimer further described,

“(In September 1991...) In Vivo Gallery will open its first show. The exhibiting artists will be members of the Indianapolis Artists Forum, which despite its officious title, is an informal association of youngish Indianapolis painters.

   They are Rex Alexander, Terry Copen, Katherine Ellis Copen, Brian Fick, Anita Giddings, Jonathan Grober, Holly Jackson, Carla Knopp, Steve Paddack and Ed Sanders.”

Mannheimer quotes Bill Adkin's aspirations for the gallery, as reflected in its name, In Vivo, a Latin phrase meaning 'in life,'

“It is a living active thing that you can see evolve before your own eyes. It represents what is happening right here in our own city. (The gallery offers) the dealer and the patron a chance to actually become a significant part of that creative process. The patron plays as much a role in the evolution of art as the artists. 

   Instead of contributing to art history by purchasing something that is already established somewhere else, you're actually helping to mold the future aesthetic direction of your own environment.” 

A few months later, Steve Mannheimer will review an exhibit of Brian Fick and Rex Alexander at In 

Vivo in his April 5, 1992, column in The Star, headlined Goofy Yet Gloomy.  The writer describes not only the works of those two artists, but In Vivo's roster in general, as he tries to put his finger on the unifying theory connecting all the Indianapolis Downtown Mass Ave artists, particular those at In Vivo. 

First, about Fick, Mannheimer writes,

“(Brian Fick's Bicycle...is one of (his) better recent pieces, another scene from an ongoing semi-symbolic, semi-narrative reconstitution of the artist's life. 

   And it is yet another scene from the goofy, gloomy theater of paintings that Fick and his friends have produced during the past few years in a collective illustration of their lives in this city and their take on it...

   (Bicycle and other current works) are more generic and thus more allegorical, more open to speculation.

   What is certain, though, is a peculiar bittersweet flavor of comedy and melancholy.”   

 

Bicycle, Brian Fick, c. 1992

And in a give and take Mannheimer had with Adkin's as they strolled the gallery, about the style of not only Fick, but Steve Paddack and others artists on the roster, he quotes Adkins, 

“ 'It's a common vein that flows through a lot of the work we show,' says gallery owner Bill Adkins. He gestures at a large painting by one of Fick's contemporaries, Steve Paddack. It depicts two empty, rather dilapidated rooms, 'dead ends,' Adkins calls them.

   Adkins admits, 'Many potential patrons...think the works are too gloomy or too intense. It's true that we think less in terms of decoration and more in terms of commentary on the artist's environment. Our artists let a certain psycho-social concern come through.' ”

Mannheimer sums up his observations by again going all-in collective, as he explains the connections among Rex Alexander's work and that of the other gallery artists,

“Despite the elegance (of Rex Alexander's 'tasteful' and 'meditative' 'almost abstractions'), the elegy is the same song sung in the bop and glop of Fick and Paddack –  and to varying degrees in the work of other gallery artists Ed Sanders, Jean Salzman, Terry Copen, Carla Knopp, Thomas Fellner, Gretchen Hancher and Anita Giddings.

   All are united in the underlying premise that their collective scene is uneasy with the grand visions imposed by billboard optimism. These artists have slid into a slough of cultural claustrophobia cluttered with unknowable signs and portents.

   Standing hip-deep in this cold stew, they react with an expression equally sneer and giggle and a certain playful willingness to paint with the muck.”

A month later, In Vivo would present Paintings by Holly Jackson and Carla Knopp.  Unfortunately, the show was not reviewed by the daily papers, and the catalog of Knopp's work in the show is difficult to know. 

House of Zod, Carla Knopp

A painting from the time that may serve as hint is House of Zod.  It is an unusual picture, painterly, of minimal content yet possessing a shimmering beauty and spaciousness. 

The interior of some unknown building – some old wooden workshop, or stable or bar –  is filled with a  couple of unrecognizable objects; a spiky bio-morph at the left edge of the painting and a small vertical white object atop a tall table or counter to the right. The scene contains just one semi-clear image, that of a disembodied steering wheel. Rudimentary in appearance, like off of an antique tractor, the tri-spoked wheel sits on the floor of an interior of shimmering gold. An infusion of promise and loss are more felt than seen in the broken luster of the room.  

It is a painting with the In Vivo-style espoused by Adkins, and ascertained by Mannheimer, well within the realm of damaged beauty on dead end avenue.  An artwork seriously at play –  giddy in the golden goop.

Seminal Shows and Pivotal Paintings.

Carla Knopp's association with In Vivo Gallery would result in an extraordinarily busy and prolific period in her early career. The year 1993, in particular, she participated in two shows just in the last half of that year. But she and her artworks were well represented for the entire period that In Vivo operated from 1991 through 1996.

A group show of seventeen In Vivo Gallery artists was held in September, 1993, the opening show of that fall's season,  and included Knopp. The show was reviewed by Steve Mannheimer in his Indianapolis Star column at the time. Ruschman Gallery, on Mass Ave as well, was also showing its group of artists at the time, and Mannheimer used his column to express the distinctions between the group shows. To get the gist of his reaction and subsequent thesis, the article is quoted at length,

“Gallery group shows are curious affairs. Generally, they mean nothing more than 'Here are the artists this gallery represents.' Rarely, if ever, do such broad spectrum selections demonstrate anything other than the gallery owner's taste – or at least the sense of which artists may have sold in the past.

   In Ruschman's case, this makes for a smorgasbord. Fine individual pieces by individual artists have little to say to each other. Certainly, there are some similarities of imagery among the artists, but it's almost a matter of coincidence...

   On occasion, however, a group show may reveal something deeper. Then, the gallery selection seems to reinforce some set of sensibilities widely held among the artists shown.

   All of the work seems a mood, in the same aesthetic ballpark and, thus, from the same psychic corner of day. That's the case with In Vivo.”  

 

Mannheimer explains further,

“Most of  the 43 works at In Vivo share a certain rough-and-ready approach to materials with more emphasis on textural exuberance than technical finesse.  

   The air of informality bespeaks of a modesty of means more than any lack of artistic ambition. Carla Knopp's Wagon Train and Ed Sander's Dwarf Pope are oil sketches aimed at some of painting's most venerable traditions.

   What unites all of this work is a generally wry or ironic attitude that just as readily expresses 

itself in buoyant splashes of color...”  

  

Just a month later, perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by critic's demand (or nudging), In Vivo would present a two-person show of Carla Knopp and Ed Sanders, in an exhibit described as 'mingled' new paintings. 

The show was previewed by Nan Hoffman in The Indianapolis News on November 11, 1993.  Knopp's contributions included small oil paintings, described as “painterly and humorous” in the article, whereas Sander's painters were described as “larger, more brutal works in oil.” 

Knopp's work Morning on Earth (top of page) was included in the show. The painting shows a development in which the artist depopulates her paintings. Recall her works from the mid-1980s were often figural quips or peopled, allegorical tableaux. But Morning on Earth presents an almost empty environment of  rolling landscape, colored by orange grass and red and pink hills. Its vivid, saturated hues, almost garish, attract the eye like a Dr. Seuss book to its page. Atop a crest of the rolling orange meadow, that is punctuated all over with a razor stubble of protruding sticks, sits an old fashioned wind-up alarm clock, tiny in the scheme of things, but jumping out from the canvas, with time reading 7:17. 

The picture's theme and a title that will recur, as we shall see, in many artworks by Knopp in the days, even decades, to come.   

Again, just a month or so later, Steve Mannheimer will visit In Vivo and present his findings in an article in The Star dated December 19. In it he covered the two-person show of Carla Knopp and Ed Sanders. It would be the most thoughtful and deep look at Knopp's work in Indianapolis to that date. The theme of the column's opening paragraphs is a 'twins separated by birth' tale,

“Ed Sanders and Carla Knopp...have been friends for years. They graduated from the same art school, drank at the same bars, attended the same parties and probably have had more than a few conversations about what matters on canvas.

   But that was the extent of (it)...

   It certainly doesn't explain why their work should appear to be cut so much from the same artistic cloth...  

   ...it was a sustained surprise to the artists when they came to install the exhibition...the two spent a good part of the day oohing and ahhing about the parallels,  and decided to take full advantage of them.

   Thus, we see such side-by-side pairings as Knopp's Birththrust with Sanders' The Plant, or face-to-face comparisons between Sanders' Last Day in Eden and Knopp's Recluse.

   At points, the similarities are startling, enough to give the viewer a few moments of pause attempting to guess who did which without reading the labels.” 

Well-Blessed Swim, Carla Knopp

Portrait of Innocent X, Ed Sanders

Mannheimer goes on the describe the techniques employed by the artists, and the resulting images,

“Both painters apply their paint in a loose, wet-on-wet technique that tends to evolve – or devolve... – into a tight range of colors hesitating between muddy sidewalks and rainbow sherbet on a foggy day.

   The visual effect is not unappealing; it is just more true than beautiful. Theirs is an urban and pedestrian vision rather than an academic one...

...Their images may be found in an emotional range as muddled as their colors, equally free of either brilliant highlights or dark stark shadows.

   Any heroics are tempered by discord; moments of poetry are short and idiosyncratic – as may be witnessed but not deciphered in works like Knopp's charmingly cryptic Gifted and Lucky or Sanders' Drapery.

   Similarly, their humor is oblique and laughter somewhat strangled – as in her quirky Morning on Earth or his Buck-Toothed Idol.” 

Gifted and Lucky, Carla Knopp

Mannheimer finally abandons his first impressions regarding lost twins and the like, and settles on a more carefully crafted, and novel, hypothesis, 

“If anything, (Knopp and Sanders) demonstrate the artistic equivalent of evolutionary convergence, where two separate species exhibit surprisingly similar appearances  perhaps due to adaptive responses to similar circumstances...

   It does seem a safe bet...that these two have their mutual fingers on some detectable but spiritually syncopated pulse of our times and our town.”    

 

Viva In Vivo!

By 1995, In Vivo Gallery had relocated from Mass Ave to 326 East Vermont. Steve Mannheimer discussed In Vivo's move, and the trial and tribulations of trying to sell its artists' works to corporate types, with gallery owner Bill Adkins in a column printed in the March 26 Star. 

   (The column also covered a solo exhibition at Ruschman Gallery and a three-person show at Chatham Gallery, a newer space on Mass Ave.)  

   The show at In Vivo was a group show, including long-standing artists Ed Sanders, Steve Paddack, Brian Fick, Carla Knopp, Holly Jackson, Doug Travis, Anita Giddings, Rex Alexander, Terry Copen, Becky Wilson, Madison Webb, Mark Jennings and Jesse Speight. Newer artists included Stephanie Newman, Jean Salzmann, Sandy Hauanio, Ralph Domenico, Besty Stirratt, and Craig McDaniel.

   Mannheimer described the overall vibe of In Vivo's multitude of offerings,

“More often than not, the work is technically grittier, more vaguely expressionistic, generally more mysterious and disquieted than...Corporate art.”

Mannheimer quotes Adkin's about the conundrum,

“A group of corporate clients came to our gallery once to look a show and they just walked around muttering to themselves...'Not hangable.' 

   ...In Vivo is a gallery for people who want to consider art more than decoration. I won't apologize for the fact that this art makes you think. If people want Muzak art, they should go to the mall.”

 

Carla Knopp's last show solo show at In Vivo would be at the Vermont Street location in June, 1995. The show was called Digging for Fire after a lyric from the similarly titled Pixies song from 1990. 

The song was by a band that was to be hugely influential on the later group Nirvana, and thus the entire grunge-era '90s. 

Its lyrics tell a simple story, in two verses, of an old woman, and then an old man. One kneeling in a hole, one sleepless on a bench. Each on a tireless quest –  not searching for some buried treasure or expecting some jackpot at the end of the rainbow,  but digging for fire. That was each their desire, right where they were. The omniscient voice of the singer, whether Black Francis or some anonymous troubadour he imagined into existence, acknowledges that the man, in verse two, lives in a town where the singer, himself, will someday live.  

A painting of flaming gold and alien foliage from the show Digging for Fire by Carla Knopp is Land of Poetry and Harmless Snakes. It is technically gritty, vaguely expressionistic and more mysterious and disquieted than corporate art. But there is something more to its song.

All these years later, it bellows like a plea screamed from beneath an opiated bridge or from inside a  gardener's backyard loft. A plea for something better, something good, something beautiful. A guttural plea – she answered with a painting –  that has outlasted Muzak, and even the mall. 

Land of Poetry and Harmless Snakes, Carla Knopp

Mark Diekhoff, April 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 Art of Carla Knopp - Part Two

Moonchild, Carla Knopp, 1991

The Missing Myths of Texas, and a Return to Indiana.

In speaking with Carla Knopp at her east-side home and studio a few weeks ago in preparation for this blog, she explained that much of her work created during her time in Texas was sold hastily in a makeshift clearance sale in a store parking lot, somewhere between Texas and Indiana. She and a traveling companion had to make snap decisions and alternative arrangements after their vehicle broke down along the way.  There simply was not room to travel on with all they had packed.

We may better imagine Knopp's work from the Texas years in looking at an image that survived the trip, of a painting called Prophetic Axewoman, 1986.  The Texas piece shares a basic color scheme with a painting she will debut in Indianapolis a few years down the road, 6 AM Drug Test, 1990. 

Besides the similar colors, both paintings show a standing female protagonist at the center. Both also presents a curious dreamlike narrative that is difficult to decipher in the waking hours but might make perfect sense in the REM of midnight.

In the Axewoman picture, a ghostly woman stands, weapon heavy in one hand at her side, while she gives a thumbs up with the other. 

Prophetic Axewoman, Carla Knopp, 1986

She appears in a  clearing in a woods, the epicenter of a riddle of clues. A  mesmerizing spiral of a freshly sliced tree trunk, a large hole hollow hiding place in a tree, a group of four seductive nymphs caressing the skeletal trees behind. 

The forest maidens are are each a different color; one is flesh, the other three are the primary colors of all art –  red, yellow and blue.

And finally, at the deep edge behind, is some brighter place, beyond the treeline and the archaic grasp of the scene. The light halos a blue mist around the woman and alludes to an escape route at the wood's edge or the encroaching light of day to break the hold of the confusing fugue. 

The later Drug Test piece was in Carla Knopp's first exhibition upon her return to Indianapolis, the two-person show, Fine Lines, at  Denouement Fine Art on Mass Avenue in April 1990. It was a show that featured new paintings by Knopp and carved wood sculptures by Vaughn Becker.

'6 AM' could refer to the time of morning, or it could refer to a test for heroin in the system, known as a 6-AM (short for 6-acetomorphine) test. 

Regardless of the precise meaning, the image itself is as harrowing as a bloody hypodermic in your bowl of Cheerios. 

6 AM Drug Test, Carla Knopp, 1990

A naked standing woman (or seated looking up) is exposed, vulnerable as a specimen, in front of a white sheet draped between two poles flying the American flag. She's holding something in her hands, but it's not exactly clear. She's caught helpless, in a posture of composed surrender, between the power poles that pull not one way or the other –  not either, not or –  she's caught in the double bind of one in the same.  

All around, in purple and dark blue, is an orbit of frenzied birds on attack mode. The horror of the moment is palpable and the crazy birds, especially, remind of the crow calls in Van Gogh's final canvas, his last look at the fields that drove him mad. 

One can only imagine Knopp's 'lost' work from the Texas years in looking at these two images separated by a few years. 

What bewildering narratives were produced? What melding of real and surreal? What puzzling parables of Knopp's were sold at a roadside, tumbling somewhere between Austin and Indy, let go of cut-rate, like Elvis velvets or bargain day roses?  

Art at '80s End.  

Steve Mannheimer was perhaps the most entertaining and astute of the various chroniclers of mid-to-late-1980s Indianapolis art. His weekly column in The Indianapolis Star was both exhaustive and tireless in its coverage. One such article, important to this topic, appeared on February 26, 1989, and was headlined “A sharing of art but not a school.” 

It was a review of Ed Sanders then current show at 431 gallery, called Paintings from '88, but also concerned an interesting bunch of Indianapolis downtown artists, as a group. 

In the column, he remarks on several of the artists, as follows,

“A signal event for the group was Thomas Keesee's show at Patrick King Contemporary Art in 1985... (of) haunted, almost gnomic, neo-mythical images.

...Brian Fick paints a world shrinking into itself, the sun withdrawn below the horizon.

...Steve Paddack exhibited pictures of bridges collapsing under the weight of viscous paint and bare, dirty apartment walls holed by pools of black.  

(Ed) Sanders paints a shrouded world, drenched in night and ashes.”

And of Carla Knopp, Mannheimer writes,

“Before she moved to Texas, Carla Knopp painted tiny, unknowable incidents, illuminated by headlights.”

Applying pattern recognition to Mannheimer's observations, there certainly seems at least a thread of an aesthetic rope tying the artists together.

By a year later, Knopp is included with several of these artists in a show at the new Hindman Gallery of Contemporary Art located well north of downtown, more toward the money, in the Geist Reservoir area. 

It was an exhibit Steve Mannheimer considered a landmark, for various reasons, but primarily because it showcased a group of  artists he had been following closely for awhile by then, many his former students, who had been informing and challenging each other for the past several years in a series of shows, mainly at 431 Gallery. 

They had, by 1990,  self-organized under an umbrella title, the Indianapolis Artists Forum, although the primary impetus and driving factor behind the organization, was former 431 Gallery ringleader and fellow artist, Bill Adkins. 

Highlights from Mannheimer's column appearing in the May 20, 1990, Indianapolis Star, are as follows,

“A couple of months ago, I saw an exhibition of paintings by Brian Fick at the 431 Gallery. A couple of his paintings reminded me uncannily of paintings done by Bill Adkins several years ago...One work also reminded me of a 5-or-6-year-old work by Carla Knopp.

The show got me thinking of other artists, of Ed Sanders, Steve Paddack, Jesse Speight, Tom Keesee, Terry Copen and others. They should be seen together, I thought. Their artistic voice is really collective, a chorus.”

Rocks and Flowers, Brian Fick

Later in the review of specific pieces in the show, Mannheimer points out further connections he sees,

“A meteor hits the center of Paddack's Poet with enough force to break your nose, the same force gnarled up in the tormented, engorged, angel overflying an earth ripe for penetration in Sanders' Oil on Canvas.

In Rocks and Flowers, Fick paints boulders with Sanders' lush brush, but in Tree Stump Painting, with its overall stump glazed wet and clear as a pool of water, he edges toward the mixed metaphor which Knopp prefers in Earth Jug, an apparition of a handled vase, an empty receptacle rising like a mountain, like a skyscraper.  (Holly) Jackson likewise mixes her metaphors, turning falling leaves into Union Jewels.

When Larry Kline paints a desk-chair as a forest and waterfall, he realigns nature as artifact, deliberately confusing the form and boundary of his image . The same strategy Fick employs in his overbuilt frames.

The analogies go on and on...”   

Mannheimer sums up his thoughts on the group of artists and the exhibition, and of their shared training at Herron, including time as students in his own classes, 

“These artists have gone far beyond any tutelage. They now take their cues from each other and from the world they inhabit, inspect and recreate with a vision that is completely and uniquely theirs  and the city's. It's now up to the city to see it and embrace it.” 

We see Mannheimer's comments about Knopp's art as being illuminative, unknowable and metaphorical. Apt words to describe Knopp's mythological mysteriousness, the koan at the crux of her works, which portray the great doubts encountered along the existential way, life's road of maybe this or maybe that.

Another art writer at the time, Sharon Calhoun in Arts Indiana magazine (September 1990),  reviewed the same show. She argues for a broader Herron aesthetic among not only the Indianapolis Artists Forum artists but their Herron instructors as well. She notes influences of certain faculty in their students, as follows,

“If you look, and not that hard, hints of Herron faculty can be seen in this exhibit: Robert Berkshire's abstract expressionism in the work of Ed Sanders; Robert Eagerton's bent for the naturalist's expression  in Brian Fick's canvases; Peg Fierke's repetitive elliptical shapes reflected by Carla Knopp; Steve Mannheimer's constant push over the edge in the thick black voids of Steve Paddack's paintings...” 

Although Calhoun questioned the emergence of any apparent Indianapolis school in the exhibit, she did  approve of the efforts overall, summing up her remarks,

“Group exhibits are rarely as solid as this one. Whether it is like environment, like education, or like minds that bind these artists, the results should be applauded and supported.”

Later that year in September 1990,  Knopp was included in another group show at Hindman Gallery, along with Holly Jackson, Teresa Sciscoe Madden, Ellie Siskind, Stephen Stoller and Penny Viantis.

Geist or Not...

As it would turn out, Carla Knopp's planned solo exhibit for the Hindman Gallery set to open May 10, 1991, was not to be. Called Human Bytes in an advertisement appearing in Arts Indiana May 1991, her work was already prepared and ready to hang, but the gallery ceased operations at the moment when she was the artist on-deck. 

Flashjoy, Carla Knopp, 1991

Steve Mannheimer in The Star and Marion Garmel, in The News, both fans of the gallery, outlined the reasons for the sudden cessation of Hindman Gallery, as a combination of a second opinion, second thoughts, or cold feet. (The articles appeared in April and September 1991.)  The bottom line was that the owner, Marge Hindman, returned her concentration to the frame shop operations that preceded her progressive gallery interlude.

In speaking with Knopp, she acknowledged her disappointment when the gallery closed when she was next up. She had been working as a waitress, applying whatever extroversion she could muster at the  job, as required. If there was a silver lining, to an inwards leaning artists being thrust into the populated milieu of a restaurant setting, it was the daily cast a characters who were to influence her next body of work.  The series of portraits that would have been shown at Hindman's.

Vic, Carla Knopp, 1991

Knopp began painting faces of customers she recalled from waiting tables. As she worked on each painting, she noticed that the memory image was transformed into a likeness of a person in her close circle of friends. 

In thinking about her description of the process, it seems a metamorphosis, though not like Kafka's. Perhaps a process of prophesy more apparent and down-to-earth than her own axewoman's. A budding awareness of the reality of change. A modest epiphany like a fortune cookie message saying 'lemonade from lemons' or 'roll with the punches.'

The downtown artists scene will transform again and again, throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, with the successive births of In Vivo Gallery, 4 Star Gallery and Harrison Center. 

Carla Knopp will be there for the entire transmutation, changing and creating, as we shall see in Part Three. 

Mark Diekhoff, April 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 Art of Carla Knopp - Part One

 Girl Like You, Carla Knopp, 1983

An Artist Like Her.

The first public notice of an exhibition by Indianapolis-based artist Carla Knopp occurred in the Spring of 1984, while she was still a student at the Herron School of Art. 

The show was part of a number of temporary installations and exhibits mounted by Herron students in and around the school and its near north-side vicinity of downtown Indianapolis.

According to an April 27, 1984, column by Marion Garmel in The Indianapolis News, the event was called Herron Goes Public, and would coincide with the biennial Painting and Sculpture Today show at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). 

Recall that the IMA show was an ambitious, recurring exhibition arranged by the museum and its Contemporary Arts Society that was a showcase of the latest thing in art, selected from contemporary galleries in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.  

Some noteworthy trends on the national stage that year, 1984, according to Garmel's article, were graffiti-inspired art, new figuration and mythological themes.  

Carla Knopp had created artworks that predated the show, prior to her graduation from Herron, and the ambiguous fascination of the young artist's vision began making its appearance in her paintings, it seems, from the start. 

Take for example, A Girl Like You, 1983 (top of page). In that picture, at first glance, a full-length depiction of a bride and groom dancing at a wedding. The man in black tuxedo and the woman in white dress and veil. But the sketchiness in the way it is painted, and the gesture of the figures invites more haphazard interpretations. Such as the dance more controlling than consensual. The woman looks to be tripping over the man's outstretched leg and into the grasp of his song.   

About  a year, then, after that painting, amid the flurry of excitement surrounding the national art show at the IMA, was Carla Knopp's first exhibition.  

She, along with numerous other Herron students, presented art in a variety of locations, including Herron itself, and others such as The Children's Museum, the Indiana Repertory Theater, and Morrison Opera Place.

Carla Knopp's contribution was described as “miniature civilizations set up in a debris ridden house” at 1615 N. Talbott Street, right across from the art school, according to Garmel's column. It is a succinct and alluring description.

In speaking with the artist in her east-side home a few weeks ago, she was not able to recall the student show, or her installation, with specificity after all the passing years. No photographs or other documentation survives, just Marion Garmel's brief mention cited above.

Another work Knopp created around this time, and opposite in concept to mini, was her monumental painting Olga's World, 1983. 

The massive horizontal work, 10 feet wide and 4 feet tall, depicted perhaps her homage to Andrew Wyeth's painting of a similar name and theme, Christina's World, 1948.  

Olga's World, Carla Knopp, 1983

Both works show a girl, an expansive field, and a distant house on a stark horizon.  But Knopp's cinematic composition shows the protagonist, Olga, with a huge rounded head and shoulders that dominate the right side of the painting with a strange leering majesty. The rear-view  portrait bust is mountain-like in the way it imposes upon the landscape.  Olga's soft, though massive, feminine lines are echoed in the curving road to the house in the distance. 

The viewer's bizarre angle on Olga, from almost totally behind, and her round head, her strange, minimal hairstyle – all serve to create a layered intrigue that defies the overtly rudimentary, comic book simplicity of the image.  

Just a month later in June 1984, the same News writer, Marion Garmel, in her weekly Brush Strokes column, would cover Knopp's participation in a three-person show.  It was the first of a summer series of shows at Lyman & Snodgrass Gallery downtown at 1456 North Delaware Street. Knopp exhibited with fellow artists Becky Wilson and Kris Lemmon.

Garmel described an overall “primitive neo-expressionism...” shared among all three artists. 

She writes of  Lemmon's work as “great whirlpools of paint”  populated with “blank-faced people.”  And Wilson's work, Garmel describes, as pictures of tribesmen “doing things in their socks.”

It wasn't a painterly style or exotic subject matter that attracted Garmel to the paintings of Carla Knopp in that show. Rather, it was the wit captured in the small, varnished paintings. 

Knopp's comedic sense is described variously in the article over and over – first in its headline as “an acrid sense of humor,” then its first line as “a wicked sense of humor,” and later in the review as Knopp's paintings' portrayal of the world “as one big joke.” 

The writer's article is noteworthy in its being the first substantive review of Knopp's work in the Indianapolis press and also in its reporting that the three artists in the show were also to be founding members of a new alternative space gallery to open that fall on Massachusetts Avenue in Indianapolis –  431 Gallery.

In the review, Garmel elaborates on what tickled at her funny bone in Knopp's art,

"(Knopp's sense of humor is) most evident in her 'meany' series – Meany #1, Meany #2 and Meany #3 – in which 'meanies' pop out of the brush to spy on lovers in a car or fell a tree that falls across a river just as a canoe is coming round the bend.

Even more fun – and a bit more eerie – is her butler series, in which the black-suited figure  of the butler, sometimes with a white serving cloth draped over his arm, cuts off the views of people swimming, a girl sitting in a garden and so forth.

It is difficult to tell whether these people the butler seems to be watching are in trouble or whether they are shouting orders to him. But the effect, both in the painting and the subject, is wonderfully surreal.”  

Not covered by Garmel's article, but related, is the work Bad Boy Good Boy, 1984,  a diptych whose two paintings show a boy each, up to something. 

It might be easier to spot the bad seed in looking at both pictures. The foul lad, presumably, holds a torch in the foreground, while a fire rages out of control behind him. Whereas the good boy is less decisively so, holding his pail of uncertain merit, while something mysterious, and yes eerie, billows like a tree-shaped, mushroom cloud of steam behind. 

Bad Boy Good Boy diptych, Carla Knopp, 1984

The Knopp style of representation here is childlike in a naivety that works well with the purported cautionary tale of her titles. Her use of color, too, is simple and symbolic –  red and black for the nasty fire boy and gray and white for the goody two shoes.    

The Lyman Snodgrass summer series of four shows would feature the art of many current and recently graduated Herron students as Steve Mannheimer described in a July 8, 1984, Indianapolis Star column. 

Mannheimer reports on gallery owner, James Snodgrass, a former Herron student himself, and his commitment to showing local artists.  A commitment, particularly with the summer series, to showing the city's young talent.  

Mannheimer also noted that many of the artists exhibited in the  series would also be associated with the forthcoming 431 Gallery.

Along those lines, the following fall, Mannheimer would review 431's first show on November 18, 1984, in his column in The Star.  About 431 generally, Mannheimer introduces the gallery and writes broadly about the artwork and ambiance of the first exhibition,

“...431 Gallery (is) the latest addition to the city's gallery scene. Named for its address, the gallery is a non-profit, cooperative venture for 12 local member artists.

All in all, the imagery is progressive, the energy is infectious and the urge is to smile quite broadly. One can't help but feel optimistic.”

And his first beguiling words about the work of Carla Knopp, and her offbeat sense of irony and humor, are also contained in the review,

“The show has a lot to recommend...Carla Knopp's two paintings of rather domestic dinosaurs, So As Not To Be Afraid and So As Not To Be Overpowered, are eerie litanies against instinct.”  

 from the Fear of Tyrannosaur series, Carla Knopp, 1984

It is noted that both Garmel and Mannheimer describe a playful dissonance, they label as eerie, in Knopp's earliest paintings. The word eerie can have a meaning across a spectrum of similar words from creepy and spooky to uncanny or unearthly, or just plain weird. 

It's a you know it when you see it type of thing.

As Carla Knopp unveils additional work of evolving themes and subjects over the following years, her brand of eerie will become better known to the Indianapolis art scene.  Her venues will venture out and about like her art and will read like a Who's Who compendium of art gallery and spaces in the latter 20th Century in our city.  

But first, she will leave Indiana, at a time that seemed just on the verge of the Mass Ave explosion. Carla Knopp would relocate to Texas for roughly five years. 

When I spoke to her recently about the unnamed art movement that seemed to be forming in Indianapolis around 431 Gallery, Patrick King and Mass Ave at the time of her departure, she balked and begged to differ about any fuss along those lines. Knopp adamantly dismissed any idea an Indianapolis school  or a label for the various downtown artists in the mid '80s. To name a group of some or a few, by definition, excludes others, and is an exercise she staunchly rejects. 

As we shall see in Part Two, which picks up when Knopp returns to Indianapolis in the late '80s, the artist will continue to explore her brand of the otherworldly with new visions of the uncanny. Her pictures will be debris-ridden, at times, gorgeously glittering, at others. Mundane, sublime or epic, her miniature civilizations to come will span epochs and emotions with timeless frenzy, frozen dread, and  many other things. 

Self-Confessed, Carla Knopp, 1984

Mark Diekhoff, April 2026

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