The First Public Sculpture of James Wille Faust

Arch, James Wille Faust

Wille in the Wild.

Within a few days of each other earlier this month, I came across two works by James Wille Faust from the early 2000s. First I stumbled across a framed print of his at the Southport Antique Mall on the city's south side, and then a few days later, when going to the Peg Fierke's show at Herron Galleries, I couldn't help but see his public sculpture at a corner outside the art school. 

What struck me was the close relation of the vocabulary of imagery and color between the two pieces – triangles, circles, arcs, teardrop shapes and bright poster colors. A little research revealed that the two works were indeed related in time and impulse, and to a concurrent event, the relocation of the Herron School of Art and Design from 16th Street to the IUPUI campus (as it was called at the time).

A Sculpture is Born.

In February 2003, Faust had an exhibition at the Domont Studio Gallery near the Eli Lilly campus on the city's near south side. The show was called Earth Air Fire and Water and contained both new paintings and sculptures and was previewed by S. L. Berry in The Indianapolis Star on February 3.

The art feature writer discussed the show with both Faust and gallery owner, John Domont, in a long pictorial column that discussed the inspiration for the paintings, and a background to Faust's 3D works included in the show. Berry relays Faust's explanation that preparation for the paintings began with sketching clouds, quoting the artist, 

“While I was drawing, a horizon line came into play...Then the shapes started working together. I began moving the horizon line forward and the cloud shapes back. I tried out different arrangements.”  

Berry writers further,

“To the shapes, Faust then began adding patterns. By the time he began painting, what he had created was a series of images that evoke the elements, sometimes individually, sometimes in various combinations. 

...The pieces...display his love and concern for the natural world.”

Again, Berry quotes Faust,

“From the cloud shapes, I started working with plumes...That led me to think about fires...Pretty soon, I realized that what I was dealing with were the elements.”

The article provides background to the sculptural works,

“In addition to the paintings, Earth Air Fire and Water features several sculptures. Actually models for larger-scale works that Faust dreams of constructing someday, they incorporate some of the same shapes and patterns that appear in the paintings.

Though he has earned a reputation as a painter, Faust majored in sculpture as an undergraduate at Herron...(class of 1971).”  

Faust is photographed peering through the negative space of one such model that appears of an overall horizontal design.

When looking at Faust's work from this show, it is hard not to think of Robert Indiana and his colorful, if not pop, signage-inspired works that often include circles and triangles and arrows. But whereas Indiana often imposed words and images to jar the emotions, and confront placidity, in the otherwise somewhat staid geometric compositions, Faust's abstractions with neo-geo colors and shapes seem an opposite performance. Although they are incredibly brightly colored, there is a soothing pattern to his shapes and harmony to his hues, as they distribute across his surfaces.  

A year later, Faust would have another show in October 2004, again at Domont Studio Gallery, Painting and Building Visions.  A September 9 preview in The Indianapolis Star included an image of Faust's Being Part of the Moment, which was included in that show.

And one year following, in an A&E (Arts and Entertainment) section front page that featured news of Herron's move to the IUPUI campus, S. L. Berry covered Faust's dream come true, with the permanent installation of his large-scale outdoor piece Arch.

Appearing in the May 29, 2005, Indianapolis Star, Berry's article begins,

“For James Wille Faust, the payoff came when a young girl leaned out of a passing car and yelled, 'Hey, that's cool!' 

She was referring to Arch, a 20-foot-tall brightly-colored aluminum sculpture that Faust and a work crew had just spent eight hours installing on cold, windy day. The sculpture, which stands outside the new Herron School of Art and Design...is Faust's first permanent piece of public sculpture.”

Berry explains the genesis of the piece, which cost $145,000 for fabrication and installation,

“Faust...has been creating maquettes (models) of sculptures he'd like to build for several years. When Valerie Eickmeier, Herron's dean, saw some of them in an exhibition, she asked if he'd be interested in creating a full-scale piece for installation in front of the art school's new facility...”   

Originally, additional outdoor pieces by local, national and international artists were placed around the grounds of the new building in a temporary invitational exhibit. Artists included Herron faculty members Greg Hull, Eric Nordgulen and Katrin Asbury. Other artists included Tom Otterness, Don Gummer, Judith Shea and Wim Delvoye. Those pieces were up for 18 months, whereas Arch remains to this day.

Time Capsules, Either Way.

Both antique malls and public art spaces share the characteristic of preserving the past. They both seem a counterweight to the inexorable heft of time's push forward. 

And so, James Willie Faust's Arch stands today as it did 21 years ago at the corner of Blackford and New York streets. 

Physically, it presents as nearly new, still fresh and eye-catching, a monument to not only Faust's vision, but the fabrication techniques or the expertise of its maintenance. And perhaps, also as a monument to Herron's arc in time, from 16th Street to IU Indianapolis.

Being Part of the Moment, a signed, 3/4 printers proof  copy, similarly, is well preserved under its glass within its frame. It loses something being amid all the homely clutter of the antique mall booth. But it is easy to imagine it more free and less confined, in its natural element, with some adequate light and a modicum of plain wall around it.

Being Part of the Moment, James Wille Faust

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 Four

Face Gut Rhythm, 1989, Peg Fierke

World View Mirrors.

Peg Fierke would continue to create art and exhibit often during the latter 1980s and all through the 1990s and beyond.  In might be said, that in these years, the second half of her career forward from about 1985 on, she would create the works that are most signature of her name and art today.  

Works from this period possess a timelessness devoid of fad or fashion. Fierke has developed an organic intricacy all her own – regardless of medium – paint, graphite or ink.

Concurrent to her artistic evolution, the first rumblings of tectonic movement in the local art scene and the overall art world in the upcoming years and decades are first sensed, we imagine, and then seen. 

Issues-oriented art exhibitions and related symposiums would continue to register and occur with greater frequency in the local scene.

From about 1985 onward, exhibitions to draw attention to dangers of nuclear proliferation, the need for environment protection, the long overdue equal representation of women and minorities in the arts and other pressing issues were held at various venues in the city, both in private galleries all the way to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 

Perhaps new ideas would not necessary triumph over earlier approaches. Not at first. But the ideas would at least get their foot in the door, and once inside, make their presence heard. 

A 1986 show would introduce Indianapolis to the eye of Holliday T. Day, the first curator of contemporary art at the the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  She would curate the show, the 6th Indianapolis Art League Regional exhibit that fall.

Marion Garmel would cover the show in her September 25 Brush Strokes column in The Indianapolis News. The writer first discusses the parameters of the show, and then adds some of observations, as well advising of the prize winners, as follows, in part,

“The Art League Regional is open to artists residing within a 250-mile radius of Indianapolis, but is advertised mainly to area universities and art schools. 

That accounts for its trendiness and also, in a way, for its warmed-over New York look. Too many of the paintings smack of the East Village, say, or are bogged down in art history.”

Garmel cites a couple of works as examples of the type she characterizes in a somewhat dismissive way. The writer seems a bit at odds with the curatorial taste of Ms. Day, as she leads her article with those remarks, but does not really explain these feeling with any detail. 

Garmel does mention additional award winners such as  third prize for Eric Schuster's Figure with Carpet, and merit awards for and untitled figure-based oil by Ed Sanders and “Peg Fierke...for Octopus, an obsessively painted large oil of repeated dot-filled ovals.” 

The reader is left to wonder of all the works shown which ones Garmel considered warmed-over, bogged down, or something else altogether.

Just a couple of months later, Fierke along with Indianapolis painter Lois Main Templeton, would exhibit paintings at the Wilson Gallery of the Krannert Fine Art Center of Anderson College in Indiana. 

Here and There, Peg Fierke

Fierke is described in the preview/press release that appeared in the Anderson Daily Bulletin, December 7, 1986, as follows,

“...Fierke...believes an artist's work reflects his or her world view and serves as a mirror to help direct ...growth and change...

Fierke tries to use very few boundaries in her work. She works with a flexible means of expression to accommodate natural deviations and imperfections. Fierke's work also reflects a great amount of spontaneity, which comes as a result of the process of doing rather than preconception.”   

The article contains an image of Fierke's large oil on canvas included in the show, Here and There, and another blurb a few days later included an image of her oil painting, Huston St., also in the show.

Huston St., Peg Fierke

The following year, a show Peaceworks was mounted at Ruschman Art Gallery on Massachusetts Avenue. An Indianapolis News article on April 8, discussed the exhibit,

“Peaceworks (is) an exhibit dealing with the nuclear arms issue...Mark Ruschman, owner of the gallery, is donating space for the exhibit.

The hope is to raise $10,000 toward expenses of the June 28 Indianapolis Concert for Humanity at the Circle Theatre.

The concert itself is a donation and time and talent by central Indiana classical musicians in support of Indianapolis Nuclear Weapons Freeze and Indianapolis Physicians for Social Responsibility.”

Over 25 artists participated, including Peg Fierke.

News writer Garmel would again cover Peg Fierke the following year in her column of May, 20, 1987. The writer reviewed her two-person show with Karl F. Michel on Mass Ave at the time. She writes,

“431 Gallery, the 'alternative space' artists-cooperative gallery...continues to be the least polished of gallery spaces (on Massachusetts Avenue). But its current show of pastel drawings by Karl F. Michel and oil paintings by Peg Fierke...is one of its strongest. 

Fierke, who puts great dabs of paint all over her canvases, has moved from tiny leaf-like ovals to explosive patterns of large sail-like forms converging on one another.”

The following year, 1988, would bring three important exhibitions for Fierke in Indianapolis and the surrounding area.

Marion Garmel would again be the art columnist to cover the first show in question from that year, July's Omnibus Exhibit at Herron Gallery. Her July 14 column explains the rationale for the show, 

“Robert Roman, who has been temporary director of the (Herron) gallery and recently became permanent, decided that it would be beneficial for gallery-goers in Indianapolis to see how their own artists compare with artists in other parts of the country.

He also thought it would be nice to see a 'body of work' by each artists. Since most newcomers have yet to build a 'body of work,' he settled on established artists in 'mid-career.' ”

Artists from outside the area included Millie Wilson - Los Angeles, Herman Costa - New York and Barry Hehemann - Chicago and Rebecca Krinke - Boston. Area artists included Carl Pope, Ellie Siskind and Peg Fierke. 

Garmel considered the show as among the best in Indianapolis that year, and began her review generally speaking and then specifically about Fierke,

“It's an extremely strong exhibit, with as many different styles and visions as there are hours in a day.

The Indiana artists hold their own very well, thank you.

Most exciting is Peg Fierke...whose expansive canvases are ordered with patterns and lines and leaf shapes through which organic, growing forms emerge. With titles like Opulent Entropy and Spiral Jungle, they throb with color and life.”

The 34th Annual Drawing and Small Sculpture Show was presented at Ball State University a month or so later.  Artists from over 40 states entered for consideration of inclusion in the show, and twenty artists were chosen from the almost 400 entries by juror Charlotte Kotik, curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum in NYC.

Behavior Sediment, Peg Fierke

Fierke was among the twenty, and an image of her large oil crayon work, Behavior Sediment, from the show, was printed in both The Indianapolis Star on September 11, 1988 and Arts Indiana magazine in the October 1988 issue.

Another important exhibit to end Fierke's exhibition year in 1988 was the Indiana Directions '88 show at the Indianapolis Art League's Churchman-Fehsenfeld Gallery that fall.

It was again Marion Garmel who was to cover the show in the local press, and her article appeared in the September 28, Indianapolis News.  The show was a first for the venue, and Garmel explains the inception's conception in the opening lines of her article,

“The Indianapolis Art League had the great idea of stepping in when the Indianapolis Museum of Art dropped its big Indiana Artists Show by staging and Indiana Artists Show of its own. 

But the Indianapolis Art League is not the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It has neither the prestige, the space, nor the resources. 

So Indiana Directions '88, the competitive exhibit for Indiana artists...is a very nice but sparse show...”

Fierke was included, as were Omnibus artists Carl Pope, Pamela De Maris, and Ellie Siskind – and others including Mae Engron (covered elsewhere in the blog here), Ed Sanders (with his painting Torso, covered elsewhere in this blog, here), Valerie Eickmeier for her sculpture, Shark's Tooth, and James Wille Faust for his Best of Show award winner, Illusionist.

Garmel referred to Fierke's work only briefly under a section of  “familiar” works near the closing lines of her review, providing the name of Fierke's piece in the show, Radiomordmous. 

On the Side of Art and Earth.

The next year, Peg Fierke would move from 431 Gallery to a new art enterprise, Goldberg & Feldman Fine Arts, located on the city's north side. Her first show there, High Tolerance for Ambiguity, would be reviewed by Marcus Chandler in The Indianapolis Star, October 8, 1989.  In the review, Chandler also reviews the latest, then current, iteration of the Omnibus exhibit at Herron. 

Chandler contrasts the two exhibits, in so far as artistic motivations inherent in the artworks produced and shown, 

“All in one unsettling afternoon, I traveled...from one end of the artistic spectrum to the other, as I visited the Omnibus '89 exhibition and Peg Fierke's exhibition of paintings and drawings...

The 10 artists exhibiting...(in Omnibus '89) are highly intellectual and, for the most part, deadly serious painters, sculptors and photographers. Each of them uses his or her work to express a point of view.

Fierke, on the other hand, paints pictures that are beautiful. For her, art is an end unto itself. Fierke's paintings and drawings are not vehicles for expressing ideas.”

Thinking about the contrast he experienced, the writer goes on to explain his point of view, regarding the current contemporary art milieu. 

“Suggesting that someone's paintings are 'merely' aesthetically pleasing is damning criticism in many art circles. Art which is not coupled with a message is not 'serious,' so say some critics.

The energy and excitement Fierke invests in her paintings and drawings reveal commitment and purpose on a much higher plane than the high-minded sloganeering and posturing that all too often propels self-proclaimed 'serious art.' ” 

That Chandler is enthusiastic about Fierke's techniques and results is obvious, as he continues,

“Fierke creates frantic energy and movement in her paintings, a feat...challenging in abstract painting. 

She uses an elongated oval...to form patterns.  The repetition of the small figures and the slight differences among them makes her paintings appear to vibrate, often accelerated by Fierke's masterful sense of color.”

He describes two paintings in greater detail, Spiral Jungle and The Ritual, then sums up his observations about the lack of narrative in Fierke's work, despite some occasional referential imagery, observing,  “...it is clear that Fierke is not suggesting a narrative line or trying to drive home a point.” 

Chandler's remarks about Fierke's work and motivating factors seem valid. It's easy to recognize her and her generation as being a part of that mid-Century movement of artists in our city for whom abstraction was a respected foundation of an evolving modern art. The beautiful art for art's sake approach we see in not only Fierke, but Terry Steadham, Steve Redman and James Wille Faust, for examples, who also came of art school age in the '60s.

But back to Chandler and his article, he proceeds to write of the bi-polar shock at seeing Fierke's show first, and then the Omnibus exhibit, on the same afternoon,

“Leaving Fierke's visual playground for the Omnibus exhibit...is like leaving the arms of a sensuous lover to join William F. Buckley's Firing Line.

(In Omnibus,) One is assaulted on all sides by artists with an urgent story to tell.” 

Power Box, 1989, Peg Fierke

Chandler's review is especially helpful in covering Fierke's work in the late '80s, in that time of shifting tastes and oppositional forces in the overall art world. By way of his colorful criticism, he simplifies a nuanced amalgam of major trends and forces affecting the art world of the time to a mere couple of players, two easily understood factions. To a bout or contest, a war of wills, between archetypal energies, as he lays out – the lover and the fighter.  

A contest for, a conquest of, the hearts and minds of artists' brains, galleries' walls and the awestruck applause of the  audience, from that time until today. 

Indeed, as early as the following year, 1990, such a tussle would play out in a series of art shows and a symposium of talks and presentations that would explore these issues of art in great detail in our city, as we shall see in Part Five of this series to follow.  

Also in Part Five, Peg Fierke's later years as an artist through the lens of her current retrospective exhibit at Herron Galleries is discussed. The show has many examples of her work from the 1990s and 2000s and portrays  the substance of Fierke's lifelong efforts – her many years teaching, her lifetime of learning. Her career of creating her Evidence of Things Unseen.  

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 Three

Module/Mass (detail), 1984, etching on paper, Peg Fierke

Troy Wasn't Built in a Day

Maybe there is likely a natural evolution of a creative spirit, a maturation, that arrives around the time of mid-career. When the first experiments are over but their lessons have been learned. By which time accolades and innovation are accepted as a part of the process as opposed to means to an end.    

As the 1970s were ending, with the next decade on the horizon, the art of Peg Fierke would begin a transition away from a vantage point of a surreal observation, an almost clinical depiction of the quirks and qualms of life, toward a viewpoint less apart and looking, and more at one with and being. 

Ideas of cross-hatching and the many steps of a marathon, and of personal life, would come more to the forefront of her thinking and appear in her artworks. 

Fierke's first inklings of this change are noted by writer Marion Garmel in her review of Fierke's new work exhibited at a 2-person show, along with Robert Eagerton, at Herron Gallery in 1977. 

In her November 9, Indianapolis News column, the writer observes,

 “Miss Fierke('s)...etchings, colored-pencil and ink drawings, and one large oil are filled with organic, vegetable-like forms in surreal juxtaposition.”

Garmel is describing in this line just a portion of Fierke's works in the show, works that emphasize earlier directions. The writer also notes a new direction for Fierke, in many other pieces,

“Most recently, the artist has moved into color(,) and a kind of wispy, coloring book style dominates her drawings. There is little of the old geometry from which she once constructed three-dimensional environments based on her drawings, but there is a great sense of motion in these new works.”   

Over the following couple of years, Fierke would be involved in numerous activities, both art and otherwise, as noted in the local newspapers. 

In 1978 , she would participate in a Herron Gallery theme show called Chairs. 

Cursory newspaper coverage of the event advised readers that the show of artworks was by Herron students and faculty. The only artist mentioned by name in a February 25 blurb was Fierke, about whom was written “...some marvelous prints by Peg Fierke in which chairs float in space, straddle each other and serve as hanging lines for underwear and seats for grass.”

Related to her life outside of art, Fierke was a volunteer and member in various outings for the Central Indiana Bicycling Association around that time.

Fierke would participate in Roadshow '79 the following year, in what is described in the Indianapolis Star, on July 15,  as an exhibit “of works on 40 billboards throughout Marion County sponsored by the Indianapolis Art League.”   

That same summer, Fierke would be in the group show of local, national and international artists at  Indianapolis Museum of Art, called Contemporary Prints and Drawings by Contemporary Women. The other local women also included were Samia Halaby, who studied at Indiana University at Bloomington, and Martha Slaymaker, a former Indianapolis resident then living in Albuquerque, NM. The more widely-known participants included Alice Neel and Helen Frankenthaler.

Fierke would cap off the '70s, and perhaps an era of her earlier style, with two important shows in the 1980;  a smelly opus of a surreal swan song first, and then the show at the dawn of her new and percussive age of many marks.  

Starting with the first show, in February of 1980, as part of the annual Herron faculty exhibit, Fierke presented her installation/sculpture, Waitin' On Summer.  

I have already covered this artwork, and Marion Garmel's impressions of this thoroughly post-modern Fierke in the prior piece about Steve Mannheimer here.  

But for purposes of understanding this period in Fierke's career, and her art influences at the time, a second look at Garmel's column is helpful.  It quotes Fierke, in her own words,

“Sometimes art seems irrelevant to the rest of your life. I was thinking of the recent Joseph Beuys exhibit in New York. It was so strong because his life is so much a part of his art. It seems important to make other things important to me part of my art.”  

Garmel further writes, explaining,

“Miss Fierke is an avid gardener and various parts of Waitin' On Summer had hung in her backyard since they were first exhibited, in an entirely different manner, at Editions Ltd. Gallery. The seed box, for example once hung from the ceiling and had giant seed pods attached to it. Later it sat in a dead tree in Miss Fierke's backyard, as pictured in a photograph that accompanies the piece.” 

Garmel again quotes the artist,

“It has deteriorated greatly since and that is part of the idea of the piece. The generative notion, of life and growing organic matter. Time goes on. Things change.”

By that November, in a show of pen and ink drawings, it seems Fierke's time had come for things to change.  Marion Garmel, always aware of Fierke's exhibitions and vigilant in covering her career arc, devoted a column of Brush Strokes to the show. 

Held at the Jewish Community Center in Indianapolis, the exhibition was reviewed in the November 1, 1980, Indianapolis News.  The column opens with the line, “No one can accuse Margaret “Peg” Fierke of standing still.”

Garmel goes on describe Fierke's award winning days, reputation and past work, from Grass in 1972 to the most recent Waitin' On Summer, from earlier that year. Garmel then describes a change,

“Now Miss Fierke has taken a new turn. Peg Fierke: Recent Works...is an intriguing show of pen and ink drawings and paintings in which surrealist space and displacement of objects  no longer plays any part.

Indeed, the drawings and paintings all seem to tell little stories in images derived from the artist's current concerns – jogging, bicycling and gardening. More interesting yet, perspective and attempts to create illusion of three-dimensional space have disappeared. All the works are surface pieces, done with a cover of cross-hatched lines that make the images appear to pop out and recede from behind a theatrical scrim.”

Garmel then quotes Fierke directly, from remarks the artist gave at the show's opening,

“In school you are always taught the most contemporary ways of printmaking...But I would go up to the Art Institute (in Chicago) and look at the old prints and love the things the old artists did, the crosshatching, the patterns formed. By manipulating the direction of the stroke you could bring out different things. It's a nice way to get transparencies.

Then I found I could get the same effects of obscuring and transparency with color.”   

Garmel continues her own observations, in response to Fierke's comments about technique, 

“(Fierke) has always been more a technician than a storyteller. Yet the works in this show are almost little autobiographies. It is easy to see what the artist's life is like. She's a dog owner, likes farms and farm animals, runs, bicycles and loves to garden. 

There is a even marriage between life and art in the way these new works are constructed.” 

And along those lines, she quotes Fierke again,

“I think the meticulous mark-making is a lot like running a marathon. The careful buildup, the training – one step at a time, one day at a time. When you run a marathon you don't run 26 miles at once, you run one step at a time.”

In December, some of the same works were shown at Herron and reviewed by Elizabeth Willis-Sowards in Arts Insight magazine. Willis-Sowards also describes the autobiographical nature of many of Fierke's latest images, such as of “the artist's dog, Otto, and wooden protective structures from her garden.”

She further describes the effects of Fierke's new techniques,

“Space and perspective are...multifaceted and complex in Fierke's works. Subtle layers of transparent space , as found in The Wrench or the Troy Bilt painting, juxtapose in the exhibit with drawings like Otto's House which seems to have countless vanishing points, yet remains cohesive.”     

Mid-career Milestone.

The 1980s would bring recurring Herron faculty exhibits every couple of years to showcase Peg Fierke's developing mark making. 

In 1981, her Line of Scrimmage series, a suite of pieces, is described by Garmel in The News as

“a line of hair-width pencil marks snakes like an S, circles like an O and divides like a zipper in 15 panels.” 

Following the progression, in an October 14, 1983, review of the then current Herron faculty show, Garmel describes Fierke's work that year,

“Peg Fierke, who in the past has gone from crisp, linear surrealistic graphics to found-object sculptures, has changed again. Here she is showing heavily painted canvases where each dense stroke is like a feather on a bird.”

By 1985, Peg Fierke will be showing at the new 431 Gallery on Massachusetts Avenue, and it will be a new writer that will review her show. Marcus Chandler, writing in The Indianapolis Star  on March 17, 1985, in a column headlined, Peg Fierke's repetitive patterns are hypnotic, begins the review, in part as follows,

“Peg Fierke is a paragon of compulsion. In her paintings, drawings and prints exhibited at the 431 Gallery...she ceaselessly repeats a single small form. 

With the exception of just two drawings, all of her works are completely covered with elongated ellipses, each approximately the size and the shape of a guppy, each dotted with a dollop of color.

Schools of ellipses are arranged in some of the works as swirling abstract images and in others as recognizable shapes.”  

(An etching on paper from this period, Module/Mass is on current display in the Peg Fierke retrospective exhibit in the Herron Galleries, Evidence of Things Unseen. The show also contains the engraved copper plate used to create that print - see image at top of page)

The writer discusses what he considers the particularly strong works in the show,

“The best paintings in Ms. Fierke's exhibit have a similar hypnotic power, such as On A Roll wherein the gentle flow of countless ellipses creates flower like images. The artist elegantly employs the essential ingredient of hypnosis: repeated suggestion.”

 

Marion Garmel would cover the same show in The Indianapolis News. In her column headlined A kaleidoscope of art appearing March 8, 1985, she writes,

“You might not think much could be made of a thin leaf shape in varying colors but Peg Fierke, in her recent paintings at the 431 Gallery ...would prove you wrong.

Miss Fierke...has been through a number of stags in her career, from the deftly surreal drawings that won her acclaim in the early 1970s to the organic “growing” constructions that she displayed in Herron faculty shows two years ago. 

Now she has turned to painting and a virtuoso turn it is. Seventeen works, mostly paintings, are in her one woman show, all based on the same idea: an oval leaf form repeated hundreds of times across a canvas, sometimes with thick outlines, sometimes with paint-daubed bodies and sometimes with little eyes so that they look like swarms of fish.”

In the thoroughly descriptive and informative column, the writer discusses the chronology of the works, the gallery layout, and a few paintings in particular,

“...Fish Eyes, with its pink eyes in purple fish, looks like fish eyes before you read the tile. On A Roll, which sold at the opening for $1500, has a sunburst effect, in oranges and greens, like a hundred bird feathers proudly spread...

...by far the best is Constancy of Change, selling for $2000 and worth every penny of it. Here the  leaf shapes are outlined in thick yellow with some white space in between, and, as the leaves touch and don't touch across the canvas, a wonderful organic pattern appears. It gives you the feeling of floating in space.”

That fall, Garmel would cover the Herron Faculty Biennial Exhibition in her News column on October 25, 1985. Fresh off her 431 Show, Fierke continues to deliver beautiful artwork, as the writer describes,

“Peg Fierke's The Blood of Others, in her current style of overall painting, is a large canvus full of eyes in which, at strategic points, the paint drips down like tears. It is one of the finest things she has ever done.” 

If Fierke had been peddling her bike toward the top of a hill, perhaps she'd reached some sort of summit by that point. Or if peddling in the desert, some sort oasis or fountain had been found. One thing is clear, she had not strayed far or often, if ever at all, from her road of discovery.

A marathon route, although perhaps preset and known at the outset, is challenging by way of duration, through its pounding pavement.  It presents its own kind of mystery –  Will I make it? –  in every one of its thousands of strides. 

A bicycle ride on an Indiana country road presents adventure at every 90 degree turn. Sometimes the tidy scheme and utility of a farm layout with its fields and buildings, sometimes the shimmering oceans of leaves of growing corn in the wind. If not summer, the winter trees, and the bifurcation of naked branches, like river deltas reaching in the sky. 

In Fierke's work the 431 Gallery Show in 1985, we see a mid-career change of route. A new path underfoot, fresh gravel for the bicycle wheels. Something new is growing in the garden, and we shall see something new in the rhythmic strata of Fierke's work to come, something of a wood-grain flow will come to fruition in Part Four. 

Photo of Peg Fierke in 1982, Indianapolis News

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

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