India Cruse-Griffin – Exhibits in Richmond and Indianapolis

Keys for My Son, India Cruse-Griffin

With two solo shows, as well as additional works on current or recent display, the artwork of Richmond artist India Cruse-Griffin was available in abundance to view in Central Indiana in February.  

Her Love Letter in Blue show at Harrison Center in Indianapolis provides a large body of mixed media collage works, as does The Unpaved Road, her exhibit at I.U. East in Richmond. And an introduction to her three-dimensional work can be seen both at the I.U. East show and in a piece on display at the Richmond Art Museum. Finally, a large work can be seen in the art gallery area of the Reid Hospital, on the second floor above the main  entrance. Recall also that she was recently seen with her major work Snow Queen, a winner for first time exhibition, at the 101st Hoosier Salon in Indianapolis last fall.

Her Art Origins of Teaching and Mentoring, Volunteerism and Donation.

India Cruse-Griffin has an earned reputation in the fields of art and education over the past number of years since concluding her art education and establishing herself as an art teacher in Richmond.

By the late 1990s, she was beginning her career as a high school art teacher, winning awards in local art and regional shows, instructing youth art camps and curating youth art shows. As reported in the November 19, 1998, Richmond Palladium-Item, her artwork Wading in the Water Under the J Street Bridge was listed as winning two awards, one for merit and one for originality, at the 100th Richmond Exhibition of city and area artists. Many additional award winning works would follow, including a merit award for There's No Place Like Home, in the 101st Richmond the next year, a show curated by Indianapolis Star art writer Steve Mannheimer. 

In August 2000, the Palladium-Item reported that India Cruse-Griffin was appointed by Indiana Governor Frank O'Bannon to a four-year term with the Indiana Arts Commission. 

A May 31, 2001 edition of the same paper reported that Cruse-Griffin coordinated many activities for the annual Children's Day event at the Richmond Art Museum. Her wide range of art making methods and styles can be imagined in examining the many arts and crafts she coordinate that day, including “candle making, bead art, tile painting, Matisse collages, origami, block painting, sand painting and finger painting.” 

Cruse-Griffin would often donate artworks for fund-raising events, such as the work Good Times, Special Friends and Times That Never End that was provided for the 10th annual Art to Heart event in support of the Richmond Art Museum and Reid Hospital Foundation in 2002.

Fourth Street, India Cruse-Griffin, from her show
A Dream Shared at Richmond Art Museum, 2004

The rich and varied active involvement of Cruse-Griffin in her community at the beginning of her art career is mentioned here as it seems this love of children, of people and place, appears a primary subject of her colorful, upbeat works of art, and is perhaps a driving force in her amazing productivity.

Methods and Motivations.

In a March 23, 2003, Richmond Palladium-Item column by Millicent Martin, an art show at the Whitewater Gallery at I.U. East is described. The show, Women: Mind-Body-Soul, included the participation of India Cruse-Griffin, and a host of additional woman and girls aged 3 to 83.

The article is interesting in that it describes Cruse-Griffin's technique and motivation in creating her work, reading

“India Cruse-Griffin of Richmond uses a collage painting technique to reflect a woman's multi-textures, multi-layered life. Griffin seeks to express how a woman feels and the undefined meaning behind common tasks.” 

Cruse-Griffin discusses her use of mixed media and her move away from realism in a January 8, 2006, article in The Times of  Northwest Indiana. The column by Tim Shellberg covers the artist's current exhibit, A Common Thread, at Muster, Indiana's Atrium Gallery.  The article explains that the “switch from realism paintings to mixed media came...out of necessity.” It describes, in the artist's own words,

“I made the change about 10 years ago when I had my first child. I realized that I didn't have enough time to be a perfectionist...that's when I kind of came up with the style that I'm creating now.”

It is a style richly colorful, figurative and narrative, and somewhat nostalgic and heartfelt. The works are often expressive in the mannered representation of the people, with the exaggerated size of hands and feet, and other visual tricks that counter classic perspective such as a soft and luxurious cubism not often seen. 

There are recurring motifs such as white picket fences and bright white dresses or clothes that make the works almost dream-like at times, a feeling emphasized by her materials as well. Her peopled landscapes and portrait studies are not realistically defined, but rather infused, created from the collage of layers of paper, and washes of paint, and a tapestry of memories, it seems. Her style is signature and immediately recognizable in works throughout her career and up to today.  

To See Her is to Know Her.

A large number of works by India Cruse-Griffin were on exhibit in February. The Unpaved Road at the Tom Thompson Gallery in Whitewater Hall at I.U. East in Richmond has just ended.  The show contained about twenty works, many in large scale, and a couple that have introduced three-dimensional assemblage and/or sculptural elements.

Three large works, about four foot square each, made a stunning showing hanging together, a winter time triptych of sorts. Snow Queen has been covered earlier in this blog, last fall when it appeared at the Hoosier Salon at the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis. Next to it in this hanging was Winters Symphony, 2025. Three musicians, not playing, but holding their stringed or wind instruments, bundled up for the frigid outdoor weather, in outfits of black, white and baby blue. They are dressed in a most amazing array of sumptuous attire; hats, scarves, fluffy cozy coats. The musician in black wears white gloves in stark contrast atop the viola-type instrument. A few large, decorative snowflakes float about the picture to emphasis the wonderland the three inhabit. 

Winters Symphony, India Cruse-Griffin

Hanging beside is Winters Day, 2025.  Here, three figures again, a snowman looking forward at the viewer, and two attendants flanking the snowman on each side. They are in profile, eyes closed as if building and tending to the snowman by heart and feeling alone. The composition reminds of a religious altarpiece with its symmetric solemnity. Again, the clothing is lavishly warm-looking, and out-of-time in the fashionable beauty it conveys.

The picture Backyard Balling, 2025, is a warm weather scene of two young women playing basketball, one actively central to the composition, and one more passive and on the edge of the game. 

The action of the main figure is emphasized by the perspective plunging forward and the wildly rippling clothing as she grabs for a basketball that seems to be exiting the picture plane and dropping into the gallery. The hands reach forward in a massive grasp toward the viewer, not quite touching the ball, but close enough to cast shadows. The rendering of the socks and basketball sneakers of the main figure possess a sculptural quality at the bottom of the painting that anchors the centrality of the view.

Street Life, India Cruse-Griffin

As mentioned earlier, Cruse-Griffin is introducing a third dimension to some new works as seen in the mixed-media sculpture Street Life, 2025. The head, shoulders and torso figurative piece is covered in collage and paint, and is positioned in front of her two-dimensional, color balanced urban landscape by the same name, Street Life. The streetscape on both the picture and the sculpture is of a densely packed urban idyll; colorful, buildings of varied and interesting types, green trees and blue skies.  The sculpture is of a woman whose foundation is of river rocks and the neighborhood described, and who wears a blouse or shirt emblazoned with her own portrait as logo. She, as sculpture, as an artistic creation, made up of her river, her street, and herself.

Also in Richmond, but at other locations, are an early large picture Dancing in the Street, 2002, along with a sculpture, not labeled, of a dancing woman in an orange dress and shoes, are displayed in the front hallway of the Richmond Museum of Art. And the large work Healing through Friendship, showing a woman and three girls enjoying a day in the park. Reid Hospital is in the background of the picture, and is where it is located on the second floor gallery area of the hospital. It portrays the four woman in a balance of colors, one dressed in white, and the other three in primary hues. The subjects are the artist, her two daughters and a niece, according to the title card for the piece. 

India Cruse-Griffin works at Richmond Art Museum

Love is Blue.

Cruse-Griffin's Indianapolis exhibition that continues into March is Love Letter in Blue at Harrison Center. She presents a body of work, both large and small, inspired by her father's war-time letters home to her mother. The letters were always on blue stationary and greatly anticipated and appreciated by her mother. 

According to the gallery notes, and in Cruse-Griffin's words, the works are “intended to evoke emotion through the various meanings of coming home, love, family, and a commitment to connection.”

Prayers under one roof, India Cruse-Griffin

A meditative state is once again portrayed in the portrait of three female figures with eyes closed and embracing as a single unit in Prayers under one roof. The harmonious and warm-colored dresses (or gowns) of the figures and the open window with curtains blowing in a breeze, create a calm and soothing image of household, or mind, at peace.

In the circle-shaped work, The Clouds and the Rain, a sole figure in a space undefined –  it's not apparent whether the limited drama portrayed occurs inside or outside, whether it's an expression of reality or dream. In the circular perfection of its outline, the picture invokes the feeling of a clock and yet timelessness too. The gleaming blaze of sun the figure holds, caught in a frozen moment, curving round its recurring path, promising the return of light, even amid any mind storm, or any actual clouds and rain.   

Sunday and the Piano shows the ability of the artist to always invent anew, even withing the confines of her settled upon methods and techniques. Even within a repeating realm of favorite motifs and the  subject matter of family, life and street. 

Sunday and the Piano, India Cruse-Griffin

In this picture, a woman at the piano in a church setting. The song is playing and she leans back at the keys, glancing up in the direction of a cross. Four others behind surround her like an archway. Just the tops of their heads visible above the songbooks they hold. 

The eight hands holding the music books are just a hint of the mostly hidden people behind the music, of the song in four voices and the fingers on the piano keys. A symbolized song of church – the harmony and synergy of its steeple, and the people inside. 

Mark Diekhoff, March 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.

Painter Joseph T. Swanson and the Art Venues in Richmond, Indiana

Fiberglass Plant Smokestacks III, Joseph T. Swanson

Art All Over Richmond.

When visiting exhibits at the Richmond Museum of Art (RAM), an art lover can easily make a day of it, by exploring additional fine art and contemporary art exhibition galleries in the city. The RAM is just south of US 40 near downtown on the west side of the East Fork Whitewater River.  

Venues on the northside near the I-70 interchange include the MacDowell Gallery at Reid Health and the Tom Thomas Gallery in Whitewater Hall at I.U. East. The campuses of both Reid Health and I.U. East are adjacent.  

The RAM currently hosts a major solo exhibition by Mason Archie of Indianapolis, as well as works by  artist and educator, Elmira Kempton, a native of Richmond who studied at the Cincinnati Art Academy and was later head of the Art Department at Earlham College. There is also a special small exhibition of  preparatory works by famed book illustrator, Garth Williams, who did the drawings for the beloved children's book Charlotte's Web.

The Thomas Gallery has a solo show, The Unpaved Road, by India Cruse Griffin, a Richmond artist, which will be covered in detail elsewhere in this blog. She currently has this solo show at I. U. East, as well as works at Reid Health and RAM, and is showing a body of work at Harrison Center in Indianapolis.

Reid Health's MacDowell Gallery currently has the exhibit Oil and Water by Joseph “Joe” T. Swanson. The gallery hangs along two long exhibition walls on the second floor above the main entrance. The space runs along a major hallway at the front of the facility, and is bathed in natural light from the front facing windows.   

 

Joseph T. Swanson's Oil and Water at MacDowell Gallery.

The title of the Swanson's show could have multiple connotations. The phrase refers to elements that don't necessarily blend well together or agree. Also, though, both substances are fluid and flowing, so the title could refer to that attribute of semisolid gracefulness that liquids possess. Both indeed are associated with art mediums, as in oil and watercolor paint. Finally, oil has an environmentally negative  connotation perhaps, whereas water invokes more uplifting and positive thoughts.

The oil of Richmond's light industrial and the water of its downtown river seem to serve as the painting grounds for the artist as he seeks inspiration from the reality of his local environment with its ancient natural beauty and the relative toxicity of industrialization.

Tie Plates on the Former GR&I, Joseph T. Swanson

Swanson presents works from two, if not more, separate threads of creative impulse, maybe.  Upon first look you might think two or more, if not multiple artists, are involved. The largest, surest group of pieces are the abstract and gestural works that many times note either a landscape origin, or object of landscape reference. The show statement that accompanies the exhibit describes a 'found object' discovery process in the artist's gestural painting.  It's not clear from the description whether Swanson starts with a landscape, or ends up there. His found object could be the painting itself, when the back and forth is finished.

The artist has a background in graffiti-inspired murals and the use of spray paint as a medium. This experience seems to inform his mark making and his color choices. Many of his paintings show the fluid and curving marks, and somewhat simple or reduced color palette, seen in monikers and tags on rolling freight-cars on railways. His paintings are devoid of any such obvious reference, though. Swanson has dissolved any link to such logos by splintering his marks and painting his strokes in a more haphazard and abstract manner. 

Prehistoric Cataract 6, Joseph T. Swanson

In Prehistoric Cataract 8, (and 6) the colors are limited to a handful of bold earth tones; blues, greens and browns. The physics and form of a cataract or waterfall is not easily seen in the work –  it is an overall abstract image.  But the tumult and chaos of the water can be imagined in looking at the churn of the brush strokes radiating about the canvas. Clear Creek Mid-Century is a mixture of architectural marks and the more organic forms, again in earthy colors – this time blue and brown. 

Similarly, in the series if three spray paint on canvas works, Fiberglass Plant Smokestacks (I,II, and III), (image at top of page) Swanson creates the landscapes abstractions with a series of limited colors per picture, about five colors each. If the industrial fiberglass plant is the subject, it appears as only a vestige of a sketchy echo, amid the overall graffiti inspired spray paint markings. The paintings seem abstracted studies of landscape motifs mixed with, and perhaps overpowered by, the brawn and muscle memory of a street artist's quick hand. 

Venetian Red Neapolitan Green, Joseph T. Swanson

That the restricted color wheel plays its roll in Swanson's art is further emphasized by his title on a few more pieces. Works named after, or with names including, colors contained in the paintings occurs in Venetian Red Neapolitan Green and Krylon Safety Plum Gamblin Manganese Violet. The latter title refers to two different paints; a fast drying, high-visibility spray paint used to mark hazard and caution areas and an artist color that contains manganese, which may or may not be toxic to humans.

Grasping at the meaning of Swanson's work by studying their titles and images is a bit slippery and elusive, a bit like grabbing at either oil or water and just touching on wet.

Joseph Swanson, educated at Herron School of Art, is from Richmond and has worked as an artist, an art educator and currently as Assistant Curator at RAM.

His exhibition at Reid Health continues through April.

Mark Diekhoff, February 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.

Connection to Freedom: Works by Mason Archie at Richmond Art Museum

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.  

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.

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.

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

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.