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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