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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.
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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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