 |
Evening, Ed Sanders, oil on board AWI Collection, orig. acquired from the exhibit Ed Sanders - New Works, FLUX, October 2006 |
A Thousand Words on Ed Sanders, Indiana Artist
An Indy artist, par excellence.
My research into a trilogy of Indianapolis art topics led me to a dusty manila folder in the newspaper archive section of the Indiana State Library downtown. I was looking into the origins of the Indianapolis art scene I had joined in the 1990s. Specifically the Faris Building art enclave at 546 S Meridian Street, and its precedent boom on Mass Ave, and the larger context of the overall contemporary scene that gave birth to both.
Cursory and initial research into these topics at the State Library revealed three articles relevant to my study, and a common thread among them.
Nan Hoffman's October 19, 1986 Indianapolis Star 'Art World' column, “Downtown studios ideal work space, say artists” contains resident and founding artist interviews and is accompanied by a photo of the east-facing entrance of the massive Morris Building as it was known in the '80s along with artists in their studio spaces.
Steve Mannheimer's Indianapolis Star 'Art & Leisure' section front page column February 26, 1989, “A sharing of art, but not a school” opines about a group of local painters, who share a Herron training and an association with the by then established Massachusetts Avenue gallery scene. Exceptional talent, if not a cohesive artistic sensibility or creed, was a common feature of the group Mannheimer discussed.
Finally, Marion Garmel's Indianapolis News 'Free Time' section front page article “Critic likes what he sees in Indiana art” provides enthusiastic coverage of the current scene and specifically the 1990 Indiana Arts Competition hosted by American States Insurance at 500 North Meridian. Theodore F. Wolff, art critic for the Christian Science Monitor judged the competition.
Ed Sanders looms large in all three write-ups.
Serious meat.
Ed Sanders was slightly apologetic about the small studio space he rented in the Morris Building in 1986. He tells Indianapolis Star writer Nan Hoffman he needed a bigger place but can't afford it. “Maybe one day I'll move into a place with more room, but what I like about this place is that it's very private and lets me go about my work very seriously.”
Sanders talks about his art materials to Hoffman. Huge oil paintings on plywood, combined with spray paint, caulking materials and more exotic items. One work contained a real fish. Sanders explanation?
“I coated it with a lot of varnish so it doesn't rot. I hope it works. It didn't with my last meat painting.”
Something in the way he painted.
Ed Sanders' 1989 solo show at 431 Gallery was something. Something of a pinnacle of artistic achievement for the painter. Something of the soon to be global zeitgeist of grunge. Something of an almost tornado spinning in a circles attempting to form. Something of a cautionary tale. Whatever its something, it inspired Steve Mannheimer to write a column among his very best.
Mannheimer writes about what he sees as the show's most successful work Torso.
“Tradition figure studies delineate bold musculature or delicate curve, express the vitality of gesture or sensuous grace. None of that for Sanders. He topples the torso...truncating the trunk, chopping the arms and spilling its guts out on the table.”
The strange workings of the light in Sanders' Torso (and other paintings) bedevils Mannheimer. He thinks out loud when he tries to explain the disconcerting effect.
“Sanders paints a shrouded world, drenched in night or ashes. And the mass of shapes is too thickly painted and repainted, colored and recolored to allow any simple specific reading.”
Mannheimer imagines an alternate read of the painting, if rolled on its side 90 degrees (like Sanders has toppled his Torso).
“...the viscera bloom as flowers in a char-broiled Chagall. And like Chagall, Sanders' compositions float in a fog of melancholy...”
Mannheimer continues to reason with the dark and weight-less peculiarity of Sanders' work.
“As palpable and heavy, as grossly physical as these subjects are...no innate sense of gravity anchors them...Buoyed by the darkness, these subjects float across a range of interpretations.”
And further, “These paintings hit the viewer like a punch in the face. The piled-up and scraped-down paint coagulates in oily, polychromed scabs. If anything weighs upon these subjects, it is moral exhaustion. They collapse, not so much in defeat as in deflation.”
The destabilizing impact and power of the paintings unleashes in Mannheimer thoughts beyond Sanders, his subjects, or his paintings. Mannheimer's thoughts are drawn to a negligent Indianapolis, careless or blindingly unaware of art treasures in its midst. Despite the anguished and existential screams of its best talents, despite a purported bridge to somewhere, a land-locked city sleeps.
“Indianapolis may not exactly be oblivion, although it has too often appeared oblivious to artists like Sanders.”
A Two for Won.
Although Steve Mannheimer was reticent to declare a contemporary 'school' or identifiable movement in the Indianapolis art scene of a little over a year prior, Indianapolis News columnist Marion Garmel declared such an arrival in her column in the summer of 1990. Her remarks were based on the critical success and growing reputation of group of working artists, mostly Herron grads from the early '80s, who had exhibited at a by then defunct Lyman & Snodgrass Gallery, and the artist-operated 431 Gallery on Massachusetts Avenue. Their new association was the recently formed Indiana Artists' Forum which had a show of work at the new Hindman Gallery at Geist.
The best among them were represented in the exposition '1990 Indiana Arts Competition' at the American States Insurance Company headquarters downtown.
About the Indiana art he chose, the show's judge, Thomas F. Wolff of the Christian Science Monitor, said that the work “would hold up well almost anywhere.” The resulting exhibition he describes as “of very real quality, range and depth. I am particularly pleased with the award winners.”
In a personal conversation with Wolff, Garmel quotes the the judge about his unusual selection of not one, but two paintings, as best of show. Both were by Ed Sanders. Wolff said simply, “he's a cut above.” It is an interesting way to describe an artist, head above the rest, one of whose winning paintings was the infamous, dismembered Torso.
Through a desert in a school with no name.
Marion Garmel seems intent on naming the unifying feature of the high and rising Indy art movement she proclaims in 1990. She seems at a loss for words though. She names not what its members share, but what they avoid. No easy, no cutesy, no bland, she sums up, about those invited to Wolff's party. It's almost a punch line about the prior movements of Kelly, Warhol and Judd or the future AI photoshop age, but she makes the point.
Suffice to say, it's a difficult business – the discovery, the elucidation and the coining of 'schools.'
Steve Mannheimer wrestled with the same damned predicament in his Ed Sander's Torso column. It's like he yearned for the perfect word to describe all the great Sanders-like artists around. He did a good job wondering about their “gritty edge of despair,” their “hands-in approach to the paint,” their “sense of hooded light in cramped spaces,” and their “grappling with uncertain personal metaphors.” Mannheimer is brilliant here, and unparalleled, in his writing on this subject.
The searching words of his fretful dissertation could end with the maxim he used at the start of the column. His early words say it perfectly.
“Before there is history and before there are styles, there are individual artists like Ed Sanders mucking about with that oily aroma on their clothes and canvases.”
And whether or not history will recall, or for how long, oil paint always smells the same.
Mark Diekhoff, July 2025
