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 Two

Print (no title given), Peg Fierke,
from Herron Faculty 12, Part II, 1972 (the basis for Straddle Chair?)

 

Artistic Space-Out Statements.

In the early 1970s, after her success with the mixed media etching Three Sided Gravity, Peg Fierke went all-in on the illusionary space with her next major break-out work, the ink on paper, color lithograph, Grass. 

Her space here, though, and her illusions, in comparison to the earlier work, seem pumped up on steroids. She's turned up the color, from monotone mainly, to a complimentary clash of orange and green. She's upped the architectural surrealism from the paradox of an Escher staircase to an outright Soylent Green. She amped up the comic elements from Archie to Weird Tales. 

She's drawn a two-tiered organic processing factory of vats and tanks.  Both growing crops, and harvested plant matter, it seems, are processed. 

The scene is peopled by either; 1) the resulting manufactured impossibles created by the sleek, white, modular machines, or 2) the alien supervisors attending the lines.

Whatever they are – these wigs on stands or hanging hippie lamp personages – these stuffed toys and perfume bottles – this gathering a dinette chairs –these are strange things that perplex. 

Grass is a large piece, about 22” x 30”, and was first exhibited in the Indianapolis Museum of Art exhibit, Works on Paper 72. 

A preview detailing the exhibit appeared in The Week In Indiana Art column of The Indianapolis Star, January 9, 1972,

“Works on Paper, a biennial exhibition which alternates with the Indiana Artists Exhibition, will open at ...(IMA)...in the third floor North Gallery.

A total of 775 drawings, prints watercolors, as well as various other works of mixed media on paper, were submitted...

There are 88 works in the show. ”

Days later, on January 12, The Star reports that Grass has been awarded the $500 best work award of all submissions. 

The same day, in The Indianapolis News, in her Brush Strokes column, Marion Garmel reviews the show. 

About Grass, she writes,

“There also seems, from this exhibit, to be a new interest in the surrealistic kind of art that Salvador Dali so loved. The influence is most apparent in some of the prize winners. Margaret D. Fierke's first-prize lithograph Grass, for example. It won the Indianapolis artist the...W. D. Peat purchase prize. In it a lush lawn grows atop what looks to be an architect's model for a square building. In the basement corn is growing, while limp Swiss cheese droops over pipes to one side, a gorilla hangs in the window  of an adjoining structure, and some chairs stand quietly off on another side.”

A month later in February, Grass would begin making the rounds, as an encore to the IMA performance; a first stop at Fierke's Indianapolis gallery, Editions Ltd. 

(As a purchase award winning work, Grass is currently in the Newfields collection, and an image of the work can be seen here.)

Fierke, who began exhibited under the name M. D. Fierke around this time, would create another big bang later that year with her submission to the Herron faculty show. 

Marion Garmel would cover the show, Herron Faculty 12, Part II, in her December 6, 1972, News column, which begins with Fierke,

“The initials in M. D. Fierke's name stand for Margaret Diane, but everyone calls her Peg.

Blonde, ebullient and not yet 30, she is a printmaker and assistant professor of printmaking at the Herron School of Art who already is something of a legend in Indianapolis art circles.

She doesn't produce much art, but what she does produce wins every prize in sight.”

Garmel goes on to describe Fierke's main submission to the show, and in doing so, introduces the reader to yet another expansion of Fierke's reservoir of art forms. 

Untitled (detail), Peg Fierke, appears mixed media 
(This work may be related in theme and style to the work Grass.
It was included in Evidence of Things Unseen
at Herron Galleries, 2026.)

Recall  that we have already seen Fierke's drawing and painting. We have seen printmaking works of a wide variety and mix of media types. We have seen assemblage-type constructions as early as 1969. 

Garmel explains Fierke's latest development in great detail, and will be quoted in large part here as a photograph of the work in question has not been located in any press coverage from that time, 

“Printmaker Fierke...has done something unusual for this show. Normally a strictly two-dimensional artist interested in the manipulation of ordinary and imaginary objects in space, she has decided to reproduce one of her surrealist-like prints in three dimensions. The “installation,” as she calls it, is all black and white with chairs stacked one on the other and limp objects hang about. It took three weeks to construct and looks remarkable like the print on which it is based, which took her two years to complete. Both are excellent.” 

The article does contain an image of the print that served as launching point for the installation (image at top of page).

Also in The Indianapolis News, on December 15, in his self-titled column, Henry Butler, the local interest writer covered the Herron faculty show, with an emphasis on Fierke's submissions. 

Known for his coverage capturing the cultural and architectural pulse of Indianapolis at that time, Butler takes a stab at understanding Fierke, an in doing so, names the work's title in the first words of his article,

“Straddle Chair, apparently the 3-D original of a two-foot-square intaglio by printmaker M. D. Fierke, takes the mind-boggling prize in part 2 of the Herron Art School faculty Exhibition.

This chicken-coop-sized structure of props, vistas, tromp-l'oiel effects combines the absurd and the clinical.

It contains hints of the old nursery chaise percee, along with multifingered gloves and similar disturbing accessories. Is it just for fun?” 

(Chaise percee is apparently a froofy word for 'potty chair.' You can join Peg in laughing, just for fun.)

Head Shrugging, Right?

It is difficult to know the exact direction of Peg Fierke's artwork over the next few years. She continues to exhibit at her gallery in town, Editions Ltd., and in shows elsewhere in Indiana and out-of-state. 

She continues to exhibit in the Herron faculty annuals, but detailed reviews of her work are scarce in this period. Photograph are hard to come by, as well.  

And even in the retrospective exhibit at Herron Galleries now on display, Evidence of Things Unseen, there is a paucity of work from the '70s.

Maybe Fierke's work at the time was less rambunctious and drew less attention. Maybe it was large and ungainly and difficult to preserve. She did continue in her sculptural investigations, though, in addition to her printmaking, that much was recorded in the newspapers.

In a show of her art at All Souls Unitarian Church in Indianapolis in January 1973, Fierke displayed woodcuts, engravings and other prints done in a surrealistic style.  In April, at Editions Ltd., she exhibited watercolors, prints, sculpture and paintings.  

Fierke was among ten artists showing in an exhibition of a total of 35 works at a national print exhibit at Eppley Gallery of Morningstar College in Iowa. 

A June 1973 Philadelphia Inquirer article about a new gallery there at the time mentions that Fierke had recently exhibited work at D. Dedic Gallery in that city. 

She finished out that year with another Editions Ltd. show in November, in a group exhibition that included Robert Eagerton and Robert Berkshire.

By the 1974 Herron faculty show, reported in the February 13, Indianapolis News, Marion Garmel's eyes were drawn mainly to just one artist out of the group. That year, it was not to be Fierke. 

A narrative-driven, constructed environment, Mrs. Hennesy's Son Tries His Hand at Art and Fails? by Raymond Van De Water, was the hit of the show according to column's headline. 

One can gather from the write-up, that it was a bloody mess, literally, by design. 

It was an installation that took up one full corner of the gallery, and presented a cinematic snapshot of a Van Gogh-esque art student's living quarters, or crime scene, and the codified contents of its environ that Garmel describes in over two columns of her review.   

Aside such a wild and woolly work, all others must have paled in cacophony.    

Perhaps Marion Garmel, spent of her observational energies after taking in the Van De Water, is left to describe Fierke's work that year as best as she is able, with tired eyes, in the most cursory and rudimentary of words. 

Garmel writes about “one-time printmaker” Margaret (Peg) Fierke, as “rapidly...becoming the best carpenter on the Indianapolis art scene.”

Less Discord, More Melody.  

In 1975, Herron presented a combined show in two parts, Faculty Print Portfolio and Monotypes. 

Fierke participated on the Print Portfolio side, along with Jon Asher, Robert Cutter, Robert Eagerton and Robert Mark.

A year later in the Herron faculty show, Marion Garmel covers a seemingly new direction for Fierke, when she writes about her in The News, dated November 3, 1976. 

Within a subsection of the column headlined West Wind Blows, she writes about a possible change of direction for Fierke.  Garmel may be referring to a move away from her “unreal” work – work the writer  describes as “organic forms crawling around each other in fields of dotted space.” 

But toward what, exactly, was Fierke moving? 

Garmel is not really forthcoming in her remarks. Fierke shows new untitled drawing and paintings “picturing various courses of the elements...” is what she writes.  It's difficult to know what Garmel was seeing, by that description. 

A 'west wind' may refer, poetically, to a change coming. 'Various courses of the elements,' though, is so spartan a description, made up of so few and somewhat boring words  – maybe it meant something more to her readers then than I'm getting now. 

Garmel had been covering Fierke and her development in Indianapolis for many years by then. Maybe it would take fresh eyes to really see the artist anew, again.

In perhaps an unlikely location in a small town in rural Indiana, a new art gallery had taken root by 1977. Gallery owner Kit Basquin's Washington Gallery in Frankfort, Indiana, began showing Fierke's work. 

In May of that year, the gallery would have a two-person exhibit of drawings by Steve Mannheimer and prints by Margaret Fierke. 

A brief preview of the work was previewed in the April 28, 1977 Lafayette Journal and Courier, as follows,

“Mannheimer's figurative drawings reflect the influence of Goya. His paintings are abstract and conceptual....

Fierke's linear drawings and prints have organic and cartographic imagery.” 

A detailed review of the exhibit and fresh eyes on Fierke's works is contained in the Art Scene column to the same Lafayette paper, penned by Jackie Ullman, and appearing June 26.  

Ullman's thoroughly observant remarks regarding both artists' work are contained in the piece, but for the purposes of this blog, it is her remarks regarding Fierke that will be covered here,

“Margaret Fierke's drawings and prints  have a very linear quality. Her subject matter, however, is largely organic with flowing contours of land, mountains, trees and plantings. The precision of her lines (are) further softened by large areas of rounded shapes, many swirling lines, and pastel colors applied...”

The writer goes on to describe several different drawings and their various attributes, such as dual views within a single work (aerial and horizontal in the particular case cited), geometric abstraction in other piece, and grid-like or cartographic line, in others.  

Ullman saves what may have turned out to be her most prescient remarks for last, about Fierke, when she speaks about the some of the artist's smaller works, 

“Fierke's etchings and pen and ink drawings are small gems. They too employ organic imagery but are less chart-like in their character than her larger drawings. The works have been done with a light touch  by a person who has a highly personalized view of today's world and the many forms of life in it.”

Indeed, as we shall see.

In the next installment, Part Three, as the 1970s turn to the 1980s, Fierke's art will flow in a new and more pensive direction, away from the startling novelty of her earliest mash-ups and award winners, toward a more resolute quietude. 

Toward homages and odes to the flow of nature. 

To the graceful beauty of environmental forms.   

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.