 |
| Gemini AI for illustrative purposes only |
Patrick King Contemporary Art – The Origins of Indy's 1980s Downtown Art Scene, Part 1
Mapping an Uncharted Realm.
In the very early 1980s, there was little to no contemporary art scene in downtown Indianapolis. Separate enclaves did exist, for the exhibition and appreciation of visual arts, scattered around the city. Some venues at the time included the Indianapolis Museum of Art on 38th Street, The Herron Gallery, at the location of the art school on 16th Street, Editions Ltd. Gallery, a successful for-profit gallery on the far north-side at Keystone at the Crossing and Lockerbie Gallery, the sole contemporary venue within the mile square of downtown at its East Street location.
Something was stirring, though, a change in the air perhaps, first noticed by Steve Mannheimer, maybe influenced by him, and described in his series of thoughtful articles in the pages of The Indianapolis Star in 1981 and 1982.
Mannheimer was a Herron instructor, a post-modern painter and fledgling art writer in those days. The subsequent decades would reveal Mannheimer as perhaps the most perceptive and astute art world observer in the history of our city. But at the time, he was just the curious eyes and mind of a local artist and teacher. And as a instructor of future painters, he knew that he, and his students, had a stake in the city's creative community. A dog in the fight. What kind of art city was Indianapolis, or would it become?
More questions than answers were evident at that moment on the verge of change. What was the relevance of Indianapolis in the world of contemporary art and career? What opportunities were available for exhibition or sale? Was Indianapolis a mere way station, a backwater with cheap rent, a history museum resting on the laurels of groups of Hoosiers who made their name a century before?
Was the Indianapolis art scene destined to reach a certain level only, and nothing greater? Was it, or could it be something else? Something more dynamic, interconnected and progressive – even an actual evolving art scene?
Mannheimer had a recent first-hand view of a main thriving scene in the art world. In 1981, he wrote a newspaper column in place of the vacationing art critic Donn Fry in The Indianapolis Star. Mannheimer made good use of the vacancy and traveled to New York to review the Whitney Biennial and other contemporary art exhibits. New York City was then still vying for predominance in the art world, a place it solely assumed since the post war years and the advent of abstract expressionism in America. But Europe was of late making a play with its many neo-expressionist artists, the in vogue movement at the time. (Coverage of this Mannheimer column appears in an earlier blog, here.)
A year later, the Indianapolis Museum of Art mounted its own biennial exhibit, Painting and Sculpture Today – 1982, which brought a gathering of works by national and international artists to the contemporary 3rd floor of the museum. Mannheimer's review of the exhibit is in the July 11, 1982, Indianapolis Star, and concludes,
“Painting and Sculpture Today is a coherent and thought provoking exhibition of state-of-the-art art being displayed in Europe. The show provides a rare and welcome opportunity to see strong individual works in view of the larger national and international contexts.”
Just a month later, on August 8, 1982, in the same newspaper, Mannheimer would focus on more regional contexts when he thoroughly reviewed the state of affairs of the local art world. He would bemoan the brain drain phenomenon too common in Indianapolis in which the best of the best seemed destined to move on, when and if the opportunity arose. Recent examples cited included Washington Gallery's Kit Basquin, who had moved operations to Milwaukee, Star art writer Donn Fry, taking on a new opportunity in Seattle and Herron Gallery's Carol Adney who had accepted a better position for more money in Colorado Springs. Mannheimer spoke with fellow Herron instructors, like sculptor Gary Freeman and modernist Robert Berkshire, who voiced their own complaints in the column. About pulled public funding for a public sculpture project in which he was a finalist, Freeman said, “I haven't heard a word in over a year. I guess the project is dead in the water.” About the Indianapolis contemporary scene, Berkshire said, “It's not happening here...Modern art continues to be a challenge to people who simply don't like to be challenged.”
Gallery opportunities for Indianapolis artists were scattered, ever-changing and uneven at best. Opportunities for progressive contemporary artists to have gallery representation were rarer still. A few places opened, closed or hung on in Broad Ripple. Lyman-Snograss was scheduled to open near the Herron art school, on Delaware Street. Downtown's Lockerbie Gallery was rumored to close.
The only bright spot for contemporary galleries was Editions Ltd. which had proved successful in both turning a profit and earning a reputation for consistent quality. That gallery's director of exhibitions was a young man, Patrick King. He had been making a name for himself, first as an associate director at Herron Gallery, and then in the mounting and skillful hanging of impressive exhibits at Editions.
Mannheimer was not to miss the significance of Patrick King's soon to be realized aspiration of opening his own gallery, and someday soon. As Mannheimer quoted him in the otherwise somewhat dreary survey,
“A person who will buy a painting in New York will not buy that same painting here only because Indianapolis doesn't have the right ambience. But, (King adds with a smile) we're working on it.”
The Princely Apprentice.
The earliest art days of Patrick King are explained in a detailed article and interview with him by Marion Garmel in The Indianapolis News on October 30, 1982. First trained in music as an organist, he won many competitions. Later, as a student at the Kansas City Art Institute, he was selected by a national awards program to paint landscapes out east in New Jersey. It was during this time that he was exposed to the art galleries of Philadelphia and New York. Garmel writes that King was enthralled by what he saw, particularly the way the art was presented in the best galleries, when she quotes him as follows,
“The professional attitude that they were the experts in their fields. They presented (art) as an object of much thought, of serious contemplation, and as a part of an absolute need.”
Upon conclusion of his studies where he earned degrees in painting and printmaking, King would find work at a museum position at Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
King tells Garmel a wonderful story about an experience he had at the museum that was likely to remain significant to his sensibilities regarding the facilitative role of museum or gallery, and the, at times, arduous presentation of art,
“It was the first time I got into the bowels of a museum...I was there when the exhibit of archaeological treasures from the Peoples Republic of China visited. I saw how the museum tore up its floors and restructured its rooms to accommodate the show. There were four Chinese ambassadors running around and people treating them like saints. It was magical.”
After his time at the museum, King would go to New York City where he worked as a waiter, usually, and when he could find it, creative work off Broadway, as graphic artist and as a set and costume designer. After this stint in the Big Apple, he would make his way to Indianapolis, in 1978.
In the May 25, 1980, Indianapolis News, Garmel first writes of Patrick King, who was then assistant curator for Herron Gallery. The occasion was her review of James Turrell's Avaar – A Light Installation, then on display at the gallery. Turrell, who was scheduled for a show of his light installations at New York's Whitney the following November, told Garmel that Avaar was his first Midwest installation.
The piece, that Garmel called mesmerizing, would prophesy his later, perennial crowd-pleasing piece Acton, 1976, that would be acquired by Indianapolis Museum of Art (now Newfields) in 1989. Acton would prove a perennial favorite with Indianapolis museum-goers, especially children, with its ability to surprise, and even flabbergast observers, generation after generation.
With Avaar, a specially constructed temporary remodeling of the Herron Gallery was required, much as described by Patrick King about the Chinese exhibit at the museum in Kansas City. A gallery could be more that paintings on the wall or sculptures on the pedestal. A lesson further amplified in first person for King.
About Avaar, King noted in remarks in Garmel's column, about the muted dynamism of Turrell's installation caused by a small fluctuation, such as a door being opened to the gallery, “...just that tiny reflected bit of outside light will create subtle changes in the color.”
Clearly, this early Turrell was proving to be as crowd-pleasing as Acton would be, upon its IMA installation many years later.
The Limited Director.
About a year later, Editions Ltd. Gallery moved from its Broad Ripple Village location on Westfield Boulevard to an expanded and modern location at Keystone at the Crossing. The occasion was covered in length by Marion Garmel in a January 10, 1981 Brush Strokes column in The Indianapolis News,
“Editions Ltd. Gallery...moved into spacious new quarters in the Fashion Mall at Keystone at the Crossing...
The gallery was opened by two women – Joanne Chappell and Joan Telesnick – in an apartment clubhouse in 1968. It now has a branch in San Francisco, employs 10 assistants here, wholesales to other dealers and is the only gallery in Indianapolis with a national reputation.
...The gallery's new quarters... are a sign of its success – more than 3,000 square feet of exhibition space with white and beige walls rising to 18 feet at the highest point, a raked black ceiling and a balcony supported by mock Greek columns...
...it is the kind of place you walk into and say, 'This is a gallery.' ”
The gallery specialized in wholesale prints, many by international and national artists, but also original painting and artworks by local artists such as Nanci Blair Closson, Martha Slaymaker, Rob O'Dell and James 'Wille' Faust.
“The gallery also employs two framers, a director of exhibitions (Patrick King, formerly of the Herron Gallery) and a stable of salespersons with design backgrounds who work with interior decorators.”
One can note a uniquely philosophical and nuanced mindset in the new gallery director of exhibitions as early as King's first curated exhibit with Editions. The three person show, called Figurative Painting. The show was in large part still life works by three artists; Richard Emery Nickolson, Paul Gerges and Wilbur Niewald.
“In his classic essay, 'The Apples of Cezanne,' art historian Meyer Schapiro observes that still-life painting opens an infinite set of possibilities to the artist.
Rather than lock him into a limited vision based on a banal set of studio props, the still life 'can appeal to artists of different temperament who are able through the painting of small objects to express without action or gesture the intimate and the personal.' ”
This take may be close but no cigar, as Fry further reports King's statement that accompanied the exhibit in his summary as follows,
“King declares that the term 'figurative' has come to mean much more than paintings dealing with the human figure, as indeed the works in this show do not. Instead, it signifies a wide range of paintings which are representational, or based on objective reality...a reality that has been filtered through the individual artistic consciousness – or, as King says, 'an evocation of a personal vision...Figurative painting is not about copying reality, rather (it is) an effort to more closely approach being something in itself.' ”
The heady statement is replete with thought provoking concepts. The basic contrast of 'figurative' versus 'abstract' art. In that binary delineation, figurals, portraits and landscapes, and yes, still lifes, would be 'figurative' as compared to 'abstract' if based on, and representing, some objective reality or actual thing.
Perhaps surrounded by a multitude of decorative abstraction, so in fashion at the time, King was compelled to draw a broad black and white line in the beige. But what then of King's 'evocation' of personal visions, which sound a lot like expressionism? Or the more beguiling statement about 'being something in itself'? Have to think about that one for awhile.
Perhaps the show's title was a provocative, art terminology gotcha after all. At the end of the day, the show was of borderline-staid still life compositions, with Nickolson's approach being most modern and befitting of a nuanced name.
In a show a little later in the year, Patrick King has settled on a more matter of fact title for the exhibit, New Works: Fixed Images in Fiber, Clay, Paper & Wood.
Marion Garmel covers the show in the April 22, 1981, Indianapolis News,
“If creativity is the ability to create something out of nothing, then nine artists whose works now are featured at Editions Ltd. Gallery are among the truly creative people of the world.
For they have taken string, fiber, clay, paper and wood and turned them into objects where the original materials often are only a name on a card...
The artists were chosen by Patrick King...His acquaintance with the work of artists doing new and unusual things comes from (his) Herron experience. 'I have loved the work of Margie Marks since I saw it in Clayfest '80 at Herron,' he says of the painted pastel low-fire porcelain plates produced by the West Lafayette potter.”
Images of a Phyllis Fannin paper work, a Diane Itter fan and a vessel by Leonard Dowhie are also included in the article, along with a review of works by all involved.
Indianapolis Star writer, Donn Fry, also provided a review of the show in his April 26, Art World column. He discusses the contributions of all the artists in great detail. He does end his article with a critique, not of the art, but of its over-abundant hanging,
“The only failing of the show of the show is that...too much is attempted in too little space. Any two or three of the (nine) artists, with more examples of their works, would have constituted a fascinating show – and perhaps set the stage for a series of such shows.”
By the time of Fry's review of another Editions Ltd. exhibit a few months later, the visual over-inclusion has been rectified to the critic's liking, as he ended his September 15 article about David McCullough's mixed-media show as follows,
“A final observation: the gallery's exhibitions director, Patrick King, has hung this show in a most sensible and pleasing way. Admittedly, the showroom's space is limited, but for a change its normal cluttered, supermarket-of-art atmosphere has been conquered by clearing the main walls and floor of all but the featured artist's work.”
It was a change for the better that portends Patrick King's eventual exhibition style that would be unveiled in his own galley space within a couple of years, on Massachusetts Avenue, as will be shown in Part Two, to follow.
Mark Diekhoff, December 2025
