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Mason Archie artworks at Richmond Art Museum including far left, Freedom Stairs and left center Sunset on the Coffin Home |
The Richmond Art Museum (RAM) presents Connection to Freedom: Works by Mason Archie, the first solo museum exhibition by the artist. Numerous paintings from two distinct bodies of recent work are included in the exhibit.
First, a grand collection of large-format, narrative landscapes from his Underground Railroad Series, and in addition, his equally impressive collection of canvases from his Landscapes in the City of Indianapolis.
The RAM is a perfect venue for the exhibition of the artist who began his career in his birthplace, Dayton, Ohio, and now makes the Indianapolis area his home. Perfect in that Interstate 70 connects the two cities, with Richmond being about the halfway point. Perfect, also, in that RAM has a long and storied history in presenting the accomplished work of notable landscape painters in its region and beyond, including T. C. Steele, a painter of particular significance and influence for Archie. And perfect in that the two beautiful, adjacent rooms showing Archie's work provide feelings of both intimacy and spaciousness, attributes also possessed by the artist's paintings.
A Road to Richmond.
Mason Archie, who began his career in the realm of commercial art in Dayton, Ohio, which included a billboard painting business, participated, as a fine artist in various art exhibits that garnered local attention in that city beginning about the early 2000s.
In an exhibit, Who Are We? We Are: Indianapolis and Dayton Artists Speak, a group show that opened first at the Indianapolis Art Center in April 2001, and then in Dayton the following February 2002 at the Dayton Visual Arts Center and the LRC Gallery – Sinclair Community College.
A few years later, in March 2006, Archie participated in an auction and exhibition of work held by the African American Visual Artists Guild, a Dayton organization.
By July of the same year, Archie was exhibiting with the Collective Art Gallery in a group exhibition, Conversations in Blackness, in the Fountain Square arts district of Indianapolis.
And the following August, Archie, by then living in Speedway, Indiana, would enter the 82nd Hoosier Salon, held in Indianapolis. He would win the Best Traditional Landscape Award for his oil painting Descent in the Fog.
In January 2012, the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis would present the exhibit Represent that included Mason Archie and 23 other artists, as the January 15, 2012, Indianapolis Star describes,
“(The) exhibition...focuses on African-American artists in Indiana and how they have influenced the Hoosier state.
The exhibit...includes 40 pieces, ranging from painting and sculpture to photography and textiles.
The museum included several historical pieces that were already in its permanent collection, but... (focused)...on contemporary works.”
When the new Sydney & Lois Eskenazi Hospital opened in December 2013 in Indianapolis, it included new works by 18 visual artists installed throughout the facility. Mason Archie was chosen for the project, and thus joined a shared heritage of artists decorating the hospital over the years.
The facility, called City Hospital in an earlier iteration about 100 years prior, began its long history of healing and art when a large group of Indiana artists decorated its newly remodeled women's and children's wards. Artists in those earlier times included T. C Steele, William Forsyth, William Edouard Scott and Dorothy Morlan.
And in 2025, Mason Archie had work represented in the Indiana State Museum show John Wesley Hardrick: Through the Eyes of an Artist, and also in a Detroit, Michigan, group show held at the Carr Center called Everyday People, Part 2.
A Creek, a River, a Reservoir and Some Trees (Not to Mention Skies).
The Indianapolis paintings of Mason Archie are all large, salon-sized pieces executed in a realistic manner, that seem slightly idealized in overall effect. The oil on linen works portray a style and subject matter that is reminiscent of Romanticism at times. Several pictures are evocative and moody in a uplifting or dreamy way, depicting a heightened realism in the distilled perfection of the vision portrayed.
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Under the Learning Tree by Mason Archie |
Judging by their recurring appearance, Archie has a fondness for sycamore trees, which are a major focus in several pictures. In Under the Learning Tree, a smartly-dressed man reads a newspaper while sitting atop a picnic table in a park setting under the dappled shade of a large sycamore tree. The painting is more realist than impressionist, but Archie has captured some fleeting light effects wonderfully. The cool shade surrounds the man in the foreground, while sunshine blazes on trees and the pond in the distant background.
The irregular and interestingly shaped canopies at the crest of tall trees dominate some paintings, while the unique brown to white fractured transition of the tree bark, signature to sycamores, provides a primary center of focus in others.
Some include figures, such as a second picture with a man reading a paper in the park, as portrayed in Best of Simple, and one of a woman walking on a gray, rainy day. In that painting, Sycamore at Senate and Fall Creek, an autumn drizzle is warmed by the orange leaves and grass that contrast with the teal umbrella the woman holds.
Trees provide a more supporting role in other paintings in which water dominates. Eagle Creek Reservoir is a picture composed and divided into four roughly rectangular quadrants of sky, water, land and trees. It possesses a unique balance. And the additional visual elements of curving dirt tracks leading the eyes deeper into the space, and also the placement of a couple of boats on the water which seem to end in deep distance at a dam, keep the viewer looking around the painting.
The large diptych, Morning on White River, portrays a wide panorama of peaceful morning solitude along the shore of the river. The scene is covered in the long shadows of early light. One can almost hear the trickle of water through the outcropping of large river rocks near the shore.
A mood of stronger feeling is experienced in some other paintings. The word sublime comes to mind in the winter view in Eagle Creek Park, with its expanse of dim sky and dormant, brown vegetation stretching from one side to the other amid a wetland freezing over with ice. And the roiling menace of not-so-fair-weather skies agitate and awe in the two pictures Morning on the White River, After the Storm and Fall Creek at M.L.K. Jr. Street Bridge.
The Story of a Freedom Road.
For Mason Archie, his personal connection to freedom may well be his immersion in moments of a wondrous nature of trees, skies and waterways. His often solitary figures, amid the beauty of the surrounding, could be metaphor for the artist himself, traveling through the real world of strife and sadness, yet focusing on the ever-presence and permanence of goodness, joy and spacious exhilaration that is always there to discovered.
In the Underground Railroad Series of paintings in the adjoining room, an epic visual narrative is displayed. The works, and their accompanying notes, tell a story of brave fugitives all across the Eastern United States, at a time when freedom was just a dream for many.
The paintings are like chapters of many heroes' journeys, a collection of their individual stories, that when taken together hint at the enormity of suffering and fear in those times. Archie's accomplishment is a historic bravery portrayed and an all-to-rare compassion painted. The exhibit should really be experienced in person,and in full, to grasp the overall story and effect of the body of work.
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Pathway on Roosevelt Island, #2 by Mason Archie |
In the painting Pathway on Roosevelt Island, #2, we have a figure on a bicycle, stopped at a fork in the path. One foot resting on the ground, as if thinking, while in the shade for the moment, which path to take going forward. Both directions appear sunlit and beautiful, both lined by sycamore trees. The dappled light does not really lead he way. The bicyclist must make the choice.
In Sunset on the Coffin Home, a picture purchased for the RAM collection, the bicyclist again appears. The mode of transport alone is indicative of the childhood feeling of freedom, and motion, air on the face and the world rushing by.
It is a sunset painted on the walls of the home of a Quaker couple in Fountain County, Indiana. Levi and Catherine Coffin, who made a choice, to be, not just anti-slavery, but active hosts for numerous fugitive slaves who took refuge in their home.
And in Archie's Freedom Stairs , a mythological freedom becomes real, as the stairway to heaven portrayed is actually to Ripley, Ohio, an important stop on the Underground Railroad.
In the waters of the Ohio River, flowing between slave lands and free, there must have been the limbo of disorientation – how can one be not enslaved anymore, but not yet free? A golden confusion, until stumbling onto the northern shore – a path out of the deep forest, and up the ravine, across the steps into light.
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partial view, Landscapes in the City of Indianapolis room of the Mason Archie exhibit at Richmond Art Museum |
The exhibit Connection to Freedom: Works by Mason Archie continues at Richmond Art Museum until March 28.
Mark Diekhoff, February 22, 2026
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