101st Hoosier Salon at the Indiana State Museum

101st Hoosier Art Salon, Indiana State Museum

101st Annual Hoosier Art Salon – Tradition and Variety.

The start of the second century of the annual Hoosier Salon exhibit has closed at the end of last month at the Indiana State Museum. Displayed in a large gallery of four long walls separated by central display section to break up the space and add hanging for the numerous works included in the show. As in prior shows, the prize winning categories for works in all media included Landscape, Portrait, Still Life, Figurative, Animal and Abstract. There was also a 3-Dimensional category for sculpture and related works. 

Jurors Anne Blair Brown and Hector Acuna curated the exhibit that included 145 works by 129 artists.

The works were arranged randomly around the gallery as opposed to gathered in groups of like subject or style. It produced the atomizing overall effect that is expected in large group shows with many artworks that can be a bit overwhelming due to the multitude of genres, techniques and colors. The two-dimensional works were hung in a modified salon-style, just two deep, that provided for uncluttered viewing when observing an artwork at close distance.

The exhibit was well attended on its last Saturday with many visitors, in small groups or alone with the art, making their way among the works, and spending time before their favorites.

Landscapes – including Best of Show.

Carol Strock-Wasson's Blue Gray Winter Light was awarded Best of Show. The large oil landscape of a snowy, winter scene delivers its title in cool to cold tones. The desolate expanse of its gray winter sky envelopes a large snow covered field that dominates the picture with a blueish hue that chills to the bone. Further cold tones of a deep evergreen tree that frames the right foreground, and a distant skeletal treeline of brown/purple, continue the somber mood. Only the barely registering orange/brown of the  scant fall foliage remaining on a few trees, and of the dormant summer grass peaking through wheel ruts in the snow, contain a hint of fading warmth. The path leads diagonally from the picture's foreground center back into the depth of the picture, to one bright spot of whitest gray in distant snow. 

The artist has another exceptional piece in the show, also a landscape, but executed in pastel, Water in the Ditch. 

As cool is her painting, warm is her pastel. Shades of bright orange and yellow color the foliage of brush and spent wildflowers that line a reflective, brightened creek in in the slanting soft sunlight of a muted harvest sky. Only the purple-appearing shadow of a treeline in the distance of the picture cools the mellow glow.

Although this artist's work does not break new ground, indeed her winter scene is reminiscent of the solemn winter works of Indianapolis artist Dorothy Morlan, who created similar paintings a century ago, Strock-Wasson's pictures indicate a mature perfection of handling and a dexterity of mood creation through her virtuoso use of color.

The winter painting can be compared with another entry, Chilled Awakening, by Curt Stanfield, also a blue and snowy winter scene.  Other than the season and the overall color, Stanfield's work shares little  in common with the Strock-Wasson piece. Stanfield achieves the shock of cold temperature through the use of a luminous pure blue to paint shadowed light on the snow which dominates two-thirds of the picture. A mere three colors, white, brown and blue, build the expressionist composition of bare, needle-like trees and the corresponding zigzag of their shadows. The paintings jarring effect is quite distinct from Strock-Wasson's more subtle use of muted cool colors. 

Another artist with two entries in the exhibit was David M. Seward, whose Aqua House won a 3rd Place in the Landscape/Cityscape category.  Experiencing the large oil painting in person, has an interesting effect. A combination of the unique close perspective of the house on the left side of the painting which angles the eye to the pictures center with its color-field wedges of sunny roof, and sun and shaded siding. Centering the eye to the same sweet spot is the arc of the bending grass, a bit blurry as if from a strong breeze in the pictures foreground. The center of interest is the aqua porch and a single pink and puny flowering plant, perhaps peony or rosebush, and the red interior front room seen in an open window between blue shutters. A spring tree, brightly lit by noonday sun, and more sketchily in the distance are a fence, a neighboring building, a rolling hillside and bit of blue sky that complete the scene.

Bridge to Heaven, David M. Seward, 101st Hoosier Salon

Seward's other entry, also an oil painting, Bridge to Heaven,  has a similar off-kilter feel.  Again the artist paints a scene whose novel composition creates a visceral sensation. The slight vortex of Aqua House is replaced in this painting by a subliminal spiral. The picture is of a bridge over a stream. The viewer stands in the painter's shoes in cool shade aside a massive concrete pier supporting one end of a steel truss bridge on the picture's left. This spot, amid a wildly corkscrewing composition made up of the alternating stripes of the bridge's shadow on the shoreline, and the steel work of the bridge itself. The spiral concludes across the river where the bridge and its shadow, reflected on the water, meet in a pincer point of blackness offset by the brightest glow of green leaves that curtain the right side of the view.

In both paintings, the artist's builds interesting pictures with idiosyncratic points of view that create drama and eye movement by observing severely receding lines of perspective.    

Perhaps the show's most surprising landscape, upon close inspection, is Adagio by Stephen B. Moss. The musical meaning of the title is 'slow moving', which may refer to the movement of time across the seasons over the course of a year, or the movement of the sun from dawn to dusk. The picture's subject is a field of brambles in familiar fall colors under a thinly cloud-veiled sky. But 'slow' may also refer to the painstaking  manner of the acrylic painting's creation. Like a gem cutter, Moss has a amassed his scene through the application of thousands of precision-edged facets of layered colors. Not strokes of paint, but micro-shards of irregular geometries;  rectangles, triangles and dashed lines. The carefully painted shapes operate like brushstrokes, with their haphazard arrangement of pixels resulting in an amazingly organic simulacrum of the nature of nature itself.

Rockport Shoppers, Jerry Smith, 101st Hoosier Salon

Other more tradition landscapes in the show include Justin Vining's Carb Day 2025, which was a 2nd Place winner in the category, Jerry Smith's two oils, Autumn Passage and Rockport Shoppers, and Summer Day, a pastel by Mary Ann Davis. The Vining painting and Smith's small town street scene each show the decisive and rapid application of colorful brushstrokes by their painters. Vining paints with a varied vocabulary of strokes, each to a distinct purpose such as linear marks for architecture and pointillist crowds. Smith's vibrant, sunny street is composed mostly of a chaotic mix of thick, brave dabs of paint applied every which way, to pleasing effect.

Calle 12 barrio San Carlos, Mary E, Mindiola, 101st Hoosier Salon

A vibrant and colorful street scene of primary and complimentary colors is the subject of Mary E. Mindiola's Calle 12 barrio San Carlos. The large collage presents a red car in the foreground offset by rolling and verdant fields, a purple street contrasting with nearby sunny walls, and the blue shadows of distance and sky as opposed to the orange roofs of houses.  

An offbeat landscape is seen in the John Hrehov oil, Neighbor Flowers. Back-lit limelight hydrangeas and a colorful bed of mixed zinnias dominate the foreground of the painting that retreats in a blurry distance, perhaps true to a photographic source. Between the retreating perspective of  two gray buildings, a bit of fuzzy tree and sky, and an out of focus figure watering with a garden hose making a bright spray of white and blue at the center of the picture. 

Music City Liquors, Brian Burt, 101st Hoosier Salon

Two works that stretch the landscape category are Brian Burt's Music City Liquors and Samuel Leopold's Cross-Connect. Burt's meticulous oil of a road sign melds the influences of pop, photo-realism, trompe l'oeil and landscape. Leopold's landscape, if it is that, is a symmetric view from above a city intersection of high-rise buildings converging. From the bird's eye vantage, the picture looks to be a hard-edge abstraction at first glance.  But a second look, and upon further review, Leopold's painting may just be a homage to the 2D universe of early video games.

Ctoss-Connect, Samuel Leopold, 101st Hoosier Salon

Portraits and Figures.

The glassy shine seen across the gallery room makes one think that Sue P. Gillock's Reflections of a Celebration is perhaps a large, colorful watercolor under glass. Actually, it is a portrait of a woman in an oil painting dominated by the natural light reflection of numerous windows around the curving surfaces of two wine glasses, toasted and tapping, from the close perspective of an unseen celebrant. Reds, Merlot and flesh tones otherwise prevail in the canvas which oozes of a warm, coziness.

Reflections of a Celebration, Sue P. Gillock, 101st Hoosier Salon

Russell Recchion's Tie-Dye Muse is a traditional seated portrait, with its female subject facing the painter, but looking away toward the natural light of a window. The light reminds one of Vermeer, as does the sitter's antique wood carved chair. But she is not distant, as the Dutch master portrayed, but rather intimate and close to the painter. Her face reveals no clear emotion, but her slightly upraised eyes present a slight yearning to her otherwise tranquil state. Beautifully and expertly painted and composed, with a small circular religious painting crowning the top background above the woman's head.

Tie-Dye Muse, Russell Recchion, 101st Hoosier Salon

She wears a tie-dye T-shirt, in well worn rainbow colors. The liveliest light is glinted from the woman's earring, a medallion necklace, and her eyes.

Inspired by Adventure by Debra Huse presents a sunny nautical theme, not unlike last year's Best of Show watercolor and gouache, Pop's Straw Hat, by Diane Wunderlich. In a typical contemporary impressionist manner, Huse has painted a photograph in oil of two children captaining a speedboat with a flag in the background. 

Me, Myself and I - I, Sepideh Motevasel, 101st Hoosier Salon

The triple abstract mixed media collage portrait, Me, Myself and I – I, by Sepideh Motevasel, presents  a three-faced contemplative figure amid a busy and colorful abstract design of various harshly contrasting textures. Head-like and animal-like forms swirl about the main subject gowned in green. The creatures could be menacing, but are rendered as dreamy apparitions, more pretty that they are scary.   

Winning 2nd Place Figure, was Jeanette Hammerstein and her oil, Are you there God, it's me. The meaning of the title is elusive in the study of a woman pouring water into a teacup. The woman wears a red puffy coat in the picture set in somber shades of dark aqua and green. It may just be an exercise in contrasting color. Ghostly figures sit at a table in the background. A more visible man, just over her shoulder, gives an impression of a white bearded wisdom. But it's only his non-shaded face beneath the bill of his trucker cap. The woman's side glance adds to the unknowing.  But there is nothing there to be nervous about that can be seen in the picture, other than sliced lemons that seem harmless enough.

John Carter's 3rd Place Figure, Santa Fe Shawl, is pure impressionism with a style influenced by Renoir and a mirrored double portrait that reminds of Manet. It takes a busy brushwork of glittering strokes to subdue the fire of Santa Fe color and pattern, and only the woman's finely painted profile and a small dish of oranges in the background can survive the opulent shimmer.

Snow Queen, India Cruse-Griffin, 101st Hoosier Salon

A colorful shawl that holds its own is seen in Snow Queen, a large full-length seated portrait by India Cruse-Griffin.  The cubist mixed media work of an ambitious scale won an award for the artist as a First-Time Exhibitor. The eyes of the viewer alternate among the face, robe and hands of the queen amid a surreal foreground of draping blankets and background of ice and bare trees.

Held, Stephanie Spay, 101st Hoosier Salon

Stephanie Spay's Held, is another portrait of a sitter with a cup of tea. However, in this picture the beverage cup, the entire scene, is from a perspective of directly above. The circular tea is at the epicenter of the oil painting, and is surrounded by the sipping subject, who, due to the strange viewpoint, is reduced to an abstraction of muted and harmonious colors of clothing, hair, flesh and carpet, all dappled variously in light from a window out of frame.

1st Place Figure was Kyle Ragsdale's The Kids Are Alright. The multi-figurative composition plays out in two rooms of a house party. The front room is a spectacle of black light neon '80s, in flaming  pink and purple. A couple of musicians play violin and guitar for a dog who sits like an Egyptian statue and a young man standing like a caryatid, melding into the wall.  Beyond the lava light of the front room, the real action takes place in the harsh yellow light of a back room, where couples form and dance and chat, oblivious to the druggy scene out front. 

The Kids Are Alright, Kyle Ragsdale, 101st Hoosier Salon

Contemporary Abstract Expressionism.   

Many of  the abstract works, including the big winner, are in the style of contemporary abstract expressionism that prefers decorative colors and carefully balanced compositions. Whereas the originators of the genre, created often unbalanced, and at times unhinged works, arguable ugly and anti-decorative to the eyes of their times, (think of Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning), the modern ab ex artists in this show have settled on large, colorful and pleasingly predictable living room pieces that would seem well suited for display amid Ikea sofas and chairs.

Winning 3rd Place Abstraction was an oil painting, Willy-Nilly, by April Willy. The work presents an abstracted clump of flowers whose globular, candy-colored petals rise from a bit a green leaves, again globular, and a few gracefully arcing brown stems. Floating flowers protrude in a raised relief of cut circles of painted canvas adhered to the face of the picture. Other fuzzier more distant blooms fade into a background, muted and dissolving but still colorful.   

Trying to Get All My Ducks in a Row, Brenda Stichter, 101st Hoosier Salon

The 1st Place winner, Trying to Get All My Ducks in a Row by Brenda Stichter, is an acrylic that pays homage to Hans Hoffman's squares by marching bright pink 'ducks' (here an artist used globules again) from top left, across the center and to the right right bottom of the picture. The effect is something not altogether pleasing or unpleasing, but something in between.

2nd Place in the category went to the fiber art piece Someplace Else I'd Rather Be, by Carrie L. Wright. Whether composed of dyed or found fabric, or a combination of both, the result is an exuberant overload of bright colors in a complex, almost paisley, design. It may vaguely represent a landscape viewed through an exploding or enlightened vision, as there seems a sky-like area at top, with a more blue and white openness as opposed to cramped cacophony of clashing color below.

Altogether different, and perhaps not an abstract at all, but rather a strange still life, is Cindy Wingo's Life's Balance VIII.  It would be no surprise to see this large acrylic picture in a flip house staging above a millennial-gray couch, but it's more than a mere bit of monochrome décor. The artist won a prize with a picture from the same series in last year's 100th Hoosier Salon. And she was exploring a similar color vein in her show Black and White at the Greater Lafayette Museum of Art of a couple years back. Hers is a careful study of hue and tone, surface, subject and composition, even if the painting is just the captured likeness of a pocketful of stones.

A piece in the style of the late abstract movement, Op Art or neo geo, is John DeCosta's acrylic TRI-Plex. Three pyramidal squares seemed to pulsate in a glowing, fluorescent, rectangular footprint amid a bed of magenta. The somewhat simple and minimal hard-edge design is softened by the wax and wane of the optical effects the artist has achieved through his painting of color diffused.     

  

A Final Three.

A First-Time Exhibitor award was given to Arkady Roytman for the small oil portrait, Katie. The unpretentious work shows a young red-headed woman in a colorscape room to match of rose, salmon, and warm flesh-tone. The deft brushwork contributes to the casual and spontaneous feel of the picture which captures the alluring likeness of a meditative calm and trust.

View Out Back - Hammond, IN, Tony Bianco, 101st Hoosier Salon

A Juror's Special Award was given to Tony Bianco and his acrylic painting, View Out Back – Hammond, IN. Bianco's painting serves as a metaphor of why art will always exist. Why drawings and paintings will always be made. The artist's eyes notice things that demand acknowledgment and preservation. A preservation beyond personal memory or words, but something more concrete, tangible, and existential, a thing to be shared. Bianco's eyes saw a washroom symphony in yellow and white. An unlikely urban oasis. He saw patina instead of grime. A momentary vision, an epiphany, acknowledge by his eyes, preserved by his paint.    

And finally, near the door, aside the People's Choice fan favorite voting box, is a watercolor by Alyssa Wolber, Onward.  It is the uncomplicated image of a child, hanging on to a challenge ladder monkey bars. The picture appears as a photograph or a magazine illustration as much as a fine art piece, as it is bereft of background detail or any painterly contrivance. But it is well and believably rendered. 

Onward, Alyssa Wolber, 101st Hoosier Salon

The child becomes an 'everykid,' as his face is obscured almost entirely by his arm hanging on the bar above.

Hang on kid, you can do it. And if you are not a People's Choice, you were almost there.

Mark Diekhoff, November 2025 

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Hoosier Salon 85th Annual Exhibit ‘Designed to Last’ at the Indiana State Museum

Eager to Please with Some Pleasant Surprises - 85th Annual Hoosier Salon 

originally appearing in The Ornomath Journal July 18, 2009

Many Hands, Fred Doloresco, 2009 Best of Show, 85th Annual Hoosier Salon

Classics, Penny French-Deal’s small oil was the first picture to capture my attention. The painting is nostalgic in its entirety. Its brushwork is impressionist, as is favored by most painters in the exhibition. The subject is a small town street of yesteryear. Arched windows and quaint awnings compose the turn of the century facades. Depression-era automobiles line the curb in colors bright enough to cheer up our modern memories of that sepia-toned era — candy apple red and a shiny royal blue.

Garden Chores by Ronald Mack is also an amalgamation of entirely nostalgic elements. Some charming farm girls dressed as in the 19th Century — either inspired from sometime else, formed from the artist’s imagination or maybe staged as a fussy tableau that Mack painted from life. The young ladies stroll through a vegetable garden, between the split rails, in the foreground of a slope-roofed farmstead shack through the long shadows of a setting sun.

Kathleen McMurray’s Pears with Blue and White Vase is composed not only of the namesake fruit and ubiquitous Japanese blue and white vessel, but also a marvelously rendered pewter spoon. The oil painting salutes Dutch still life masterfully, but that is as far as it goes.

Two award winning paintings hanging near one another reveal the eye of the jurors at play. Bahama Breezes by Denise Pettee-Frazier and Lifting Skies by David Tutwiler both exhibit a loose, sensual gauze of brushwork and a subject matter that inspires happy fuzzy memories of sunny holidays.

Snowy Day on Washington Street by Chris Newlund showcases the artist’s engaging and deft handling of the brush. The painting’s subject is sweet and is seductive almost to the point of being cringe-worthy, like Auguste Renoir can be at times. The chair barely exists at the painting’s edges, as the artist skillfully propels the viewer’s attention to the drama of the scene — a pregnant clump of grapes about to splash the coffee cup.

An idiosyncratic vision is displayed in the folk art collage by Ed McEndarfer, Storm Over Paradise. Decoration for decoration’s sake really — one motif is a line of Indiana-looking trees interspersed with half hidden palms.

William Lawson’s Autumn Shallows captures a natural moment of expressionist color — the bright oranges, deep blues and paling greens of an Indiana lake side in October. Despite the active color scheme, Lawson achieves an almost Chardon-like calm and harmony with the painting. The painting’s realism is all the more apparent with the nearby hanging of Marianne Glick's Abstract I. Glick’s abstract shares the same expressionist's colors but presents them to provoke a jagged and jarring effect, quite the opposite intention of the serene scene painted by Lawson.

The big, rolling bend of Lynn Dunbar’s Mighty Ohio River is painted of similar expressionist colors, shared also by her other entry, Little Pink Houses, Alton. This artist seems to utilize the colors in a more premeditated manner, as both pictures use them the same. But maybe the artist caught both scenes at a similar moment of light.

Virtuoso performances are awarded with the palette knife oil by Beth Forst, Cornrows Below Zero, and the pastel industrial impression and gossamer handling seen in The Ethanol Plant by Carol Strock-Wasson.

Dan Woodson has a sense of humor, I imagine. His My Summer Home begins at first glance as a visual riddle. The scene is a seek and find of the picture’s subject amid the visually busy and interesting monochrome crosshatching woodland branches that act a Cy Twombly camouflage. Woodson’s summer place is a tree house, with requisite swinging tire hanging from a branch, all covered in winter snow.

C. J. Fang’s Expressive Tranquility, not surprisingly, expresses tranquility. I found the composition of the acrylic painting to be among the most beautiful in the exhibit. The shapes of the clumps of marsh grass — the sky indivisible with the crystal still water. The golden ripe and fresh green shoots.

I wanted to enjoy the fabric collage Chicago, N. Michigan Ave. by Joel Fremion more. However, the work affected me less due to the inclusion of the word Prudential on a skyscraper and the composition’s starting point, the front steps of the Art Institute of Chicago and the pre-fab drama of its stone lion.

By my count, there are thirteen pictures of the traditional ‘winding road’ genre all hung together on a section of wall. However, one work among them displays an unexpected turn. To state it simply, Alan Patrick’s Winding Road doesn’t. He’s painted a winding road stripped of all nostalgia and pre-packaged charm. It’s just a typical Indiana 3-way stop. A ‘T’ intersection. As if the blunting top of the ‘T’ wasn’t enough to frustrate a winding road, the stark left/right choice is further obscured by the heavy shade of the overhanging treeline.

Pamela Denny-Rohrbach’s Bittersweet, Vanitas I expresses joy. A joy in painting, a joy in the objects and color of life, a joy in living. She’s composed a still life that’s a roller coaster of movement similar to some of Cezanne’s lopsided cornucopias. Her approach contains no shortcut. All included is intricate and wild. The shrinking jagged oak leaves, an almost obscenely decorative fabric tumbling from the table in a myriad of folds, complicated oriental porcelain, an odd King Neptune fruit bowl.

The 2009 ‘Best of Show’ is Fred Doloresco’s Many Hands. Doloresco’s skills as a painter are marred a bit by the overwhelming nostalgia of his subject. Even the picture's framing seems to aspire to imitate an earlier age. The result, unfortunately, is somewhat gaudy and overly sentimental to my tastes — a mash of Milet’s L’Angelus and similar pictures with Monet's haystacks, all in a picture frame fit for a king. The picture’s scale is admirable. Indeed it shares the ambitious size seen in the works that make up the Society of Western Artists exhibit showing concurrently down the hall. The picture’s painterly effects can entertain, to be sure, if you stand nice and close. But at a distance, Doloresco’s harvest peasants have become too familiar to excite all that much.

See also:

Hoosier Art Salon website

Indiana State Museum Exhibits