Indianapolis Painter Ed Sanders in the 1980s

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

See also: Ed Sanders - Life and Art  - partial catalogue of 2014 posthumous retrospective at Herron School of Art and Design 

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Terry Steadham – Art World Remembers

“Ever since I can remember I’ve had a fascination with a sense of a wondrous energy, a kind of magic, that pervaded all of nature ─ including myself.” 

Terry Steadham

January, 1991

Terry Steadham enjoyed a long and varied art career beginning with his education and graduation at John Herron School of Art from 1964-67. Steadham's first solo exhibit was displayed in Lieber Gallery in Indianapolis in 1968, and he was included in a group show of Indianapolis artists at the Indianapolis Museum of Art the same year.

Over the next decade, he exhibited often in Indianapolis and in an ever-widening circle throughout the Midwest and beyond, including shows in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and New Orleans.

The New York art scene beckoned and Steadham lived and worked in Manhattan for several years in the later '70s through the early '80s. From his Bowery neighborhood studio, he produced works that were included in many exhibits including two person and other small group shows, as well as larger themed exhibits such as The Survival Show at Old P.S. 64 in 1981 and The U.F.O. Show at the Queens Museum of Art in 1982.

Steadham took on commercial work during this period, producing LP album and book covers, including perhaps most fittingly, the Arthur C, Clarke book The View from Serendip, 1977.

Steadham’s art path would branch out to Texas for a five year period beginning in 1984 and ending in 1988 with exhibitions at D. W. Gallery in Dallas. During this time, he continued to show work in New York, and notably, returned to exhibit in his hometown of Indianapolis for the first time in a decade in Holiday Show at Ruschman Art Gallery. 

(Ten years later in 1998, Steadham’s first exhibit at my Five Ten Gallery in the Faris Building in Indianapolis would be as part of an exhibit, also called ‘Holiday Show’ with fellow artists Dale Newkirk, Todd Lantz and Casey Roberts.)

Steadham would return to reside in Indianapolis in 1989. He would continue to exhibit with Ruschman Gallery for the next four years until 1992, and would eventually settle into a studio loft in the Faris Building artists enclave and a more elusive, bordering on reclusive, exhibition schedule between 1993-96.

It was at this time that I met Terry Steadham. First his art, and then his person.

In October 1996, I was renting a large, raw studio space in the southwest corner of the 5th floor of the Faris Building. I had been there for a couple of years by then. I always opened the doors to my space for the monthly or bi-monthly building open house events which drew large numbers of the Indianapolis art curious. After one such opening, Hot House Gallery’s Philip Campbell, who was my next door neighbor in the building, introduced me to graffiti artist and local impresario David Crowe. Campbell and Crowe had a proposition. They suggested I share with them in presenting  Crowe’s 3rd Annual Erotic Art Show in my space. I agreed, and I worked with them to ready the room and install the show. Crowe, and perhaps to some degree, Campbell, were responsible for choosing the artwork to be included.

Art almost seemed an afterthought to the spectacle of the party that included light S &M, piercings, tattoos and nudists, and several kegs of beer. But I cannot forget the wildly pornographic and brutal self-described ‘allism’ works of outsider artist, Jan Scott Boyer.  

The event and art as described would first appear as antithetical to the participation of Terry Steadham or the inclusion of his subtle, elegant, quantum mechanical art.  But he was represented by Tease, a small multimedia drawing on paper that depicted a sensual Rod of Asciepius form more erotic and elusive than anything else in the show.

 

The amazing jam-packed attendance of the show whetted my desire to turn my studio into a commercial gallery, and within a few weeks, I would get myself fired from my day job, and use my nest egg savings to open my first art space, Five Ten Gallery.

Five Ten began to generate some local buzz and Terry and I became personally acquainted shortly after the gallery opened in May of 1997. 

I would  eventually exhibit Terry’s work on a number of occasions. First in the pre-mentioned Holiday Show of 1998, then in the final exhibit in Five Ten Gallery before the Faris Building was sold and closed for good in April 1999; his solo show Coming Home. 

Summer Dream, mixed media on paper , 5" x 5"  from Holiday Show

Later, he was part of the group show Summer ’99 along with painters Jean Salzmann and William Burton Lawson at my latest gallery in a storefront location on Meridian Street directly across from Shapiro’s Delicatessen.

Negative, mixed media on paper  5" x 5"  from Summer '99

Terry and I had long, lazy afternoons discussing all things art world on the many slow traffic days that made up the bulk of my time running an art gallery. Indeed, it still stands as a record to this day. My longest sustained conversation in my life was the day we talked for eleven hours straight.

Some great sales did occur along the way. One patron had been watching a particular painting by Steadham back to the Ruschman Gallery days. It was one of the last of his long, panoramic paintings in a signature style that not yet sold. It was to be the most expensive artwork I sold.

We celebrated with a dinner at Bob Evans and a walk around the neighborhood aside the restaurant. The nighttime streets, the modest homes, the large lawns, mature trees and the sound of summer abuzz. We walked several long laps around the huge neighborhood over a period of hours as domestic lights and glowing televisions were extinguished one by one, beneath a crescent moon which Terry pointed out to me to take notice.

He told me about his marriages, the three of them, and his daughter, his New York friends, his commercial art jobs, and how it all fit together somehow; his life and his art.

I suppose I learned over time the degree to which Terry was fascinated by space, the planets, the sky.

When we had to move out of the Faris Building in a rush when it was sold, we went in together to rent a storage space and I helped him emptying out his studio, and he helped me emptying out my gallery.  It was then that I saw his childhood telescope, in a weathered and beat up box, but still colorful, still nifty as all 1950s toy boxes will always be.

And later, when Terry’s friend, and my fellow gallery owner, David Kadlec had some of us out to his farm for a spring party, Terry had a telescope set up. Myself, even at around  age 40,  I had never looked through a telescope before. Pointing toward the vastness of the rural night sky, Terry called me over to see. 

I bent down a bit to peer through the eyepiece, and there, somewhere way out there, was Saturn and Saturn’s rings, all alone yet together, in blackness, dancing for the rest of time.

Steve Mannheimer said enough when he said of Terry Steadham’s work ─ “thank you notes to the universe”.

Years later in the Spring of 2014, Jean Salzmann contacted me to tell me that Terry was in the hospital. He had suffered a stroke followed by further complications and was near death. I was numb. 

I had bumped into Terry in Frankfort, Indiana the previous September. Our paths crossed after several years for what would be the final time. He was at a ‘star party’ gathering of amateur astronomers for an overnight star gazing and camp out. I was at the same Boy Scout camp to play a solo round of disc golf. We had a nice visit under a bright sun and then we parted ways.

Jean suggested that I not come to see him due to the rapid decline of his health and the fragility of his condition by that time.

His memorial gathering and celebration of life at the Wheeler Arts Building later that year was the most amazing tribute. Persons spoke of a father, a husband, a friend, of a twin brother…so loved…so missed…and so remembered. 

And so unknown to me, despite all the many hours spent together in our art world conversations and dreams. Whole lifetimes of adventures, he never mentioned once.

I thought about his artworks. As all encompassing as our Milky Way. As unfathomable as a drop of water with an ocean full of creatures never seen.

His art showcased his thoughts and his talent. His awe of perfection. His aim for perfection. His efforts to resolve everything, to sum everything, tie up all loose ends, all within the four corners of his work.

It’s not possible, of course, and planets and protons, white noise and space dust, all spittle and spill, arc and cartwheel out beyond the edge of his paper or canvas. Terry Steadham was honest in that way.

Terry Steadham Walking in Indianapolis in summer of 1999

Rodney Walker - Art World Remembers

Rodney Walker on porch of T.C.Steele home, Nashville, Indiana 1999  photo by the author

Rodney Walker, Artist

I met the artist Rodney Walker about twenty-five years ago when we both rented space in the Faris Building, the hulking box of cheap rent and plentiful studio space on the near south side of downtown Indianapolis. The inaugural exhibit and opening in my art gallery on the fifth floor had occurred on May 2, 1997 and Walker was showing work in Lois Main Templeton’s seventh floor studio the same day. By June, Walker had rented studio space on the east side of the fourth floor and joined the Faris Building artist community. Walker’s studio, like all spaces in the building, had huge banks of windows on the outside wall, with his looking out onto Old Meridian Street directly across to the former original Manual High School.



I’m not certain when our paths first crossed, but certainly by the late summer we met, as my visitor book indicates he attended both the opening and closing receptions for Paul Neufelder’s paintings on glass which ran from August 22 through October 25. He signed the book R Walker, with his West 10th Street address, at the exhibition’s opening, but by the show’s closing, he signed in with a new declaration; Rodney Walker Artist, 400 Suite Faris Building.



In a conversation I had with Walker, in early 2001, he recalled the year and a half he spent in the Faris Building with great fondness. “The saddest day I had was knowing that I had to leave. I left my home, Christmas Eve (1997), and never went back to it. I lived and slept in the Faris Building, and lived and breathed my art.” Walker left a personal note under my gallery doors in November 1998 before he left. ‘No words can describe the way I feel. The many cold and hot nights and days we’ve talked about life and art. I thank you.’ The Faris Building was notoriously hot in the summer and cold in the winter, with its glass exterior, rickety steam radiators and no AC. His note ended with his best wishes and advised me he was setting up a new studio on N. Belmont Ave.



Rodney Walker observing the renovations to the former Faris Building, August 1999 
photo by the author

Walker was mainly self-taught as a painter, sculptor and comic strip artist. Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1946, his early education includes graduation from Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis in 1965 and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Social Work from Indiana State University in 1970.Walker’s formal art training was the completion of a two-year correspondence art course in 1991 and some drawing classes at the Indianapolis Art Center in 1996.

Noteworthy work produced during this period included his comic strip Sef Chaney, U.S. Marshal which ran in the Indianapolis Recorder from 1993-1997, and a portrait series of drawings Tuskegee Airmen – Indianapolis Chapter which was created for the 1997 National Convention held in Indianapolis.

The Black Angels of Pelelliu, Rodney Walker, photocopy of a charcoal drawing, dated 8-99

Informally, Walker studied art and artists relentlessly, viewing VHS tapes and pouring over books from his local libraries, attending galleries and museums and perhaps most importantly, visiting artists’ studios.

Once, after his Faris Building times, his Haughville apartment suffered a break-in and his VHS player was stolen. He was upset his art studies were interrupted so callously and looked forward to replacing the VCR as soon as he received his next paycheck. His employer at that time, in the early 2000s was Indianapolis Public Schools where he worked periodically as a substitute teacher.


Walker was friendly and sociable and moved through various art circles in Indianapolis.

In the wake of the closing of the Faris Building in the Spring of 1999, new scenes were forming at the newly christened Murphy Art Center in Fountain Square, the Harrison Center in the vicinity of Herron School of Art and the Bodner Building on Madison Avenue. He had friends and acquaintances in all those places.


Walker works on his Horse sculpture, his painting They Worked Hard and Paid the Price on the wall behind, 2000,  photo by author

Walker visited my Irvington home often, sometimes on the hottest days of summer, to beat the heat of his apartment which lacked AC. I had a window air conditioner in my home and the cool air blew directly onto the area where Walker worked on various things including clay figure soldiers for a diorama project he was creating for display at the Indiana War Memorial Museum downtown.

Rodney Walker Drawing in His Sketchbook, graphite on cardstock, 2000, 
drawing by the author

Walker loved catfish dinners and we went to Old Country Buffet many times, at Southern Plaza in those days, where he would run into young restaurant workers that knew him from his substitute teaching at nearby Manual High School. We discussed art scene goings on and events of the day, but also his favorite artists. He took pride in the accomplishments and was inspired by the painters of the famed Harlem Renaissance, mainly Horace Pippin and Jacob Lawrence. Another favorite was Robert H. Colescott, who was a mentor, and provided advice and encouragement via the telephone conversations instigated by Walker over the course of a period of time.





(Title Unknown), Rodney Walker,  mixed media drawing, 1998

I accompanied Walker on pilgrimages to the T.C Steele Studio and Museum property near Nashville, Indiana, and to view the Thomas Hart Benton murals around the campus at Indiana University in Bloomington.

They Worked Hard and Paid the Price, Rodney Walker, oil on canvas board, 1999

The subject matter of Walker’s paintings was drawn from his African American experience, both good and bad. As a baby boomer, the popular culture of his times also influenced his work.

The era of slavery is depicted in Going North, oil on un-stretched canvas, which shows the nighttime exodus of a family on the run. He described this work in early 2001 as one of his most ambitious and important. “The month before I left (the Faris Building), October ’98, I was happy with painting Going North. One of the artists gave me a piece of canvas in ’97. I didn’t know what to do with it. I feel to this day it is my best work. My pastor Kenneth Christmon has the painting in Richmond, Indiana.”


Going North, Rodney Walker, oil on canvas, 1998

Walker also recalled in 2000, “I have to think about the Marvin Gaye painting because that was a very intense project. I went down to the studio one Friday night from work. My friend Ralph (painter Ralph Domanico) was playing some Marvin Gaye tapes in his studio, I had a couple beers and remembered how I met Marvin Gaye in the summer of ’75.” The shared beers and music with an artist friend inspired the project that resulted Walker’s large format portrait of the singer, A Tribute to the Late Mr. Marvin Gaye.




In February 2000, additional works by Walker, in his solo show Planted Seeds from Early Black America, were shown in the storefront gallery I had on Meridian Street just south of the Faris Building.

Walker had great attendance and support for the opening reception of his Planted Seeds show. A boyhood friend and an ex girlfriend from his personal life as well as numerous others from his teaching life, his church worship community and his friends and fellow artists George Murff and Anthony Radford from his then current New Jersey St. studio scene.

Lois Main Templeton was in attendance, and artist Christos Koutsouras who purchased Walker's Only a Few Will Stand Together from the show. 






Rodney Walker in 2000 photo by the author

Walker participated in the annual Meet the Artists group show held at the Marion County Central Library location in Indianapolis in 1997, 1998, and beyond. 

Per Scott Miley’s Indianapolis Star article, Walker contributed three artworks self-described as ‘propaganda posters’ for display at the Somber Tribute, Serene Celebration on September 11, 2002 held at Ivy Tech State College in Indianapolis.

In February 2013, Rodney Walker collaborated with Bruce Armstrong and Harrison Center for the Arts in the group show Black Light. 

In March of 2016, Walker was a participant in The Forgiving Sea, an interactive painting by Carolyn Springer, displayed at the Harrison Center for the Arts.


Rodney Walker  (right) with the author on Talk Show in Project Space, Murphy Art Center, 2001 screenshot video by the author




Rodney Walker viewed the movie Basquiat every day for a month during the summer of 1998. At the end of that strange self-imposed trial, he produced an unusual and interesting painting of the same name, Basquiat. It shows two figures. A large imposing profile in the foreground dominates the canvas and depicts a man with huge hair looking toward a graffiti artist at work along a row of homes, tiny in the distance. There is just a speck of sunset sky. 
The viewer must decide which figure is which. Who is watching who? One generation observing the next? One part of the psych wary of another? The spraypaint can some kind of magic weapon, but against a king so massive and strong? Some elemental Basquiat-part of Walker, or of us?


-Mark Diekhoff



orig. published 4/24/23 4:42 PM 

Basquiat, Rodney Walker, oil on board

Rodney Walker, 70, passed away September 19, 2016.    

Above four paintings were included in Walker's exhibition Planted Seeds from Early Black America, February 2000