Thoughts on the Closing of Ruschman Gallery

AI image by Gemini for illustrative purposes only

originally appearing in The Ornomath Journal, 06/24/09

Mark Ruschman's One Helluva Ride

About a month ago, I ran into David Kadlec, who used to run Eye Blink, a gallery in the Murphy Art Center. As two former gallery guys, the subject was showing art. He asked me if I ever thought about opening up a new place. It wasn't really a question maybe, probably just small talk. Truth is, I think about it quite often still — even though next year marks ten years since I closed my final commercial space. Besides Grateful Dead concerts and great stuff I did as a kid, running an art gallery was the most fun I’ve ever had doing something.

I told Kadlec no. I remarked that the local scene had changed. Things — the world — had moved on. “They don’t even do solo shows anymore,” I said. Kadlec reminded me, “Ruschman still does solo shows, doesn’t he?”

I first saw Ruschman Gallery in 1992 or 3, just before I walked a couple doors down to Bill Adkins’ In Vivo art gallery when they were still neighbors on Massachusetts Ave. By then the Indy ‘golden age’ of contemporary art was arguably ending. A 'phase two' was sorting itself out with In Vivo closing and Ruschman relocating to the slightly more remote and exclusive situation on Alabama Street. Hot House and Four Star were on the horizon.

I recall just one art detail from that day — a large calm Steve Paddack painting leaning against a wall in an upstairs storage room at In Vivo. It was a painting of a corner of an empty room leaning in the corner of an empty room. That painting, in that place, inspired me to take up paint brushes myself and open a gallery that might see fit to have such large impossible things inside and even hang them on the wall.

I didn't visit Ruschman Gallery often. Perhaps just a handful of times over all those years. Ruschman's activities were covered thoroughly in the art press though — spanning Steve Mannheimer all the way to Konrad Marshall — so you could keep up with his vision whether you saw it in the flesh or not.

When I had a gallery, I noticed all the young local artists aspired to be with Ruschman. Clearly he was able to balance business with beauty better than anyone else in Indianapolis.

At that time, in my young and dumber days, I found Ruschman Gallery ‘safe’ with its stable of regional academics. Keep in mind I was just an up and comer, trying to distinguish myself somehow. Hard knocks later, I grew to admire his long run business model. It contrasted so clearly with my crash and burn through the savings five-year plan. Ruschman’s was the tougher way, the road less traveled in the long haul, as my highway was littered with not only the wreck of my Five Ten Gallery, but with the rusting hulks of prior makes like 431 and In Vivo, and the accidents waiting to happen still on the drawing board — Oblique, EM Gallery, LAMP, Eye Blink, Everyday Inventors, Penumbra, FLUX and more. I'm not insulting us flameouts, just attesting to the dependability and durability behind Ruschman's nameplate.

Ruschman was always the standard. Others maybe wanted to be more experimental than Ruschman. Have bigger walls than Ruschman. Have more young artists than Ruschman. More 'laid back' atmosphere than Ruschman. More sculpture, more installations. More music, more themes, more chainsaws of death, whatever. In reality though, probably — just be the next Ruschman — certainly in terms of success.

We beg for change, and then it comes. The Murphy Building is for sale — IMOCA’s fired the paid staff and is tightening its belt— some Indy artists who have 'chose to stay' have finally gotten an exhibit at the Indiana State Museum (but not that many really, not when you consider all those who did not) — and now, Ruschman Gallery is closing — clearing out — bolting the doors.

That Ruschman Gallery lasted almost to a silver anniversary makes the reason for the closure seem all the more preposterous — mere economics — according to the David Hoppe interview with Mark Ruschman in this week's NUVO. Life is short, art is long, right? Oh well, maybe the math don't lie. In the same Hoppe article Ruschman does imply that in addition to the deep recession the changing numbers and habits of Indy's art collectors weighed in as an impulse to his final decision.

Maybe Ruschman will change his mind. Maybe this economy can turn on a dime. Whatever comes next — if Ruschman parks his Cadillac for good — the ride won't be the same.

Mark Diekhoff, June, 2009

see also:

On the Cusp : After 25 years, Ruschman Gallery Closing

Indy Star - Art Seen : Ruschman Gallery Closing After 25 Years

Indiana Economic Digest : Economy leads to Ruschman closing downtown Indianapolis art gallery

Terry Steadham – Art World Remembers

“Ever since I can remember I’ve had a fascination with a sense of a wondrous energy, a kind of magic, that pervaded all of nature ─ including myself.” 

Terry Steadham

January, 1991

Terry Steadham enjoyed a long and varied art career beginning with his education and graduation at John Herron School of Art from 1964-67. Steadham's first solo exhibit was displayed in Lieber Gallery in Indianapolis in 1968, and he was included in a group show of Indianapolis artists at the Indianapolis Museum of Art the same year.

Over the next decade, he exhibited often in Indianapolis and in an ever-widening circle throughout the Midwest and beyond, including shows in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and New Orleans.

The New York art scene beckoned and Steadham lived and worked in Manhattan for several years in the later '70s through the early '80s. From his Bowery neighborhood studio, he produced works that were included in many exhibits including two person and other small group shows, as well as larger themed exhibits such as The Survival Show at Old P.S. 64 in 1981 and The U.F.O. Show at the Queens Museum of Art in 1982.

Steadham took on commercial work during this period, producing LP album and book covers, including perhaps most fittingly, the Arthur C, Clarke book The View from Serendip, 1977.

Steadham’s art path would branch out to Texas for a five year period beginning in 1984 and ending in 1988 with exhibitions at D. W. Gallery in Dallas. During this time, he continued to show work in New York, and notably, returned to exhibit in his hometown of Indianapolis for the first time in a decade in Holiday Show at Ruschman Art Gallery. 

(Ten years later in 1998, Steadham’s first exhibit at my Five Ten Gallery in the Faris Building in Indianapolis would be as part of an exhibit, also called ‘Holiday Show’ with fellow artists Dale Newkirk, Todd Lantz and Casey Roberts.)

Steadham would return to reside in Indianapolis in 1989. He would continue to exhibit with Ruschman Gallery for the next four years until 1992, and would eventually settle into a studio loft in the Faris Building artists enclave and a more elusive, bordering on reclusive, exhibition schedule between 1993-96.

It was at this time that I met Terry Steadham. First his art, and then his person.

In October 1996, I was renting a large, raw studio space in the southwest corner of the 5th floor of the Faris Building. I had been there for a couple of years by then. I always opened the doors to my space for the monthly or bi-monthly building open house events which drew large numbers of the Indianapolis art curious. After one such opening, Hot House Gallery’s Philip Campbell, who was my next door neighbor in the building, introduced me to graffiti artist and local impresario David Crowe. Campbell and Crowe had a proposition. They suggested I share with them in presenting  Crowe’s 3rd Annual Erotic Art Show in my space. I agreed, and I worked with them to ready the room and install the show. Crowe, and perhaps to some degree, Campbell, were responsible for choosing the artwork to be included.

Art almost seemed an afterthought to the spectacle of the party that included light S &M, piercings, tattoos and nudists, and several kegs of beer. But I cannot forget the wildly pornographic and brutal self-described ‘allism’ works of outsider artist, Jan Scott Boyer.  

The event and art as described would first appear as antithetical to the participation of Terry Steadham or the inclusion of his subtle, elegant, quantum mechanical art.  But he was represented by Tease, a small multimedia drawing on paper that depicted a sensual Rod of Asciepius form more erotic and elusive than anything else in the show.

 

The amazing jam-packed attendance of the show whetted my desire to turn my studio into a commercial gallery, and within a few weeks, I would get myself fired from my day job, and use my nest egg savings to open my first art space, Five Ten Gallery.

Five Ten began to generate some local buzz and Terry and I became personally acquainted shortly after the gallery opened in May of 1997. 

I would  eventually exhibit Terry’s work on a number of occasions. First in the pre-mentioned Holiday Show of 1998, then in the final exhibit in Five Ten Gallery before the Faris Building was sold and closed for good in April 1999; his solo show Coming Home. 

Summer Dream, mixed media on paper , 5" x 5"  from Holiday Show

Later, he was part of the group show Summer ’99 along with painters Jean Salzmann and William Burton Lawson at my latest gallery in a storefront location on Meridian Street directly across from Shapiro’s Delicatessen.

Negative, mixed media on paper  5" x 5"  from Summer '99

Terry and I had long, lazy afternoons discussing all things art world on the many slow traffic days that made up the bulk of my time running an art gallery. Indeed, it still stands as a record to this day. My longest sustained conversation in my life was the day we talked for eleven hours straight.

Some great sales did occur along the way. One patron had been watching a particular painting by Steadham back to the Ruschman Gallery days. It was one of the last of his long, panoramic paintings in a signature style that not yet sold. It was to be the most expensive artwork I sold.

We celebrated with a dinner at Bob Evans and a walk around the neighborhood aside the restaurant. The nighttime streets, the modest homes, the large lawns, mature trees and the sound of summer abuzz. We walked several long laps around the huge neighborhood over a period of hours as domestic lights and glowing televisions were extinguished one by one, beneath a crescent moon which Terry pointed out to me to take notice.

He told me about his marriages, the three of them, and his daughter, his New York friends, his commercial art jobs, and how it all fit together somehow; his life and his art.

I suppose I learned over time the degree to which Terry was fascinated by space, the planets, the sky.

When we had to move out of the Faris Building in a rush when it was sold, we went in together to rent a storage space and I helped him emptying out his studio, and he helped me emptying out my gallery.  It was then that I saw his childhood telescope, in a weathered and beat up box, but still colorful, still nifty as all 1950s toy boxes will always be.

And later, when Terry’s friend, and my fellow gallery owner, David Kadlec had some of us out to his farm for a spring party, Terry had a telescope set up. Myself, even at around  age 40,  I had never looked through a telescope before. Pointing toward the vastness of the rural night sky, Terry called me over to see. 

I bent down a bit to peer through the eyepiece, and there, somewhere way out there, was Saturn and Saturn’s rings, all alone yet together, in blackness, dancing for the rest of time.

Steve Mannheimer said enough when he said of Terry Steadham’s work ─ “thank you notes to the universe”.

Years later in the Spring of 2014, Jean Salzmann contacted me to tell me that Terry was in the hospital. He had suffered a stroke followed by further complications and was near death. I was numb. 

I had bumped into Terry in Frankfort, Indiana the previous September. Our paths crossed after several years for what would be the final time. He was at a ‘star party’ gathering of amateur astronomers for an overnight star gazing and camp out. I was at the same Boy Scout camp to play a solo round of disc golf. We had a nice visit under a bright sun and then we parted ways.

Jean suggested that I not come to see him due to the rapid decline of his health and the fragility of his condition by that time.

His memorial gathering and celebration of life at the Wheeler Arts Building later that year was the most amazing tribute. Persons spoke of a father, a husband, a friend, of a twin brother…so loved…so missed…and so remembered. 

And so unknown to me, despite all the many hours spent together in our art world conversations and dreams. Whole lifetimes of adventures, he never mentioned once.

I thought about his artworks. As all encompassing as our Milky Way. As unfathomable as a drop of water with an ocean full of creatures never seen.

His art showcased his thoughts and his talent. His awe of perfection. His aim for perfection. His efforts to resolve everything, to sum everything, tie up all loose ends, all within the four corners of his work.

It’s not possible, of course, and planets and protons, white noise and space dust, all spittle and spill, arc and cartwheel out beyond the edge of his paper or canvas. Terry Steadham was honest in that way.

Terry Steadham Walking in Indianapolis in summer of 1999