Margaret “Peg” Fierke – Artist and Teacher
In the tumultuous year 1968, amid the chaos and strife and destruction, the generative flow of life persevered. People fell in love, children learned in school, artists were inspired to create novel things of wonder. Humanity endured.
Oceans and beaches suffered abuse, neglect and pollution, but the planet would survive. From the bounty of the ocean, seashells still washed on the beach.
Who can deny the beauty of the symmetrical perfection, the color, the textures of seashells?
Of all things – exoskeletons – logarithmic spirals made of calcium carbonate, and some divine smoke and mirrors.
To Create Images, Break Rules and Lecture on Etching.
While a Master of Fine Arts student in her final year at University of Illinois, the art of Peg Fierke is introduced to the readers of a North Carolina newspaper, The Chapel Hill Weekly.
On April 14, writer Virginia Read, in her The Graphic Arts column, covered the 2nd National Student Printmaker's Exhibition hosted at the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ms. Read describes the overall show as follows,
“Seventy-five prints from art schools all over the country are on display. The first impression you get is of an almost feverish variety of techniques. Intaglio, woodcut, lithograph, serigraph, collagraph – some are in black and white, some in color, and many use a mixture of techniques.”
Of the many works, the writer makes mention of just a few she especially enjoyed, including “...Margaret Fierke's intaglio with its stained glass colors.”
The following fall, Indiana art students and art readers would also meet Margaret Fierke as her post-graduate career would begin with her being hired as a lecturer in a printmaking department of an Indianapolis art school.
The Indianapolis Star had a short piece on September 17 announcing the beginning of a new academic year at Herron School of Art.
“Herron...began its new academic year yesterday with the largest student body and faculty and added facilities in its 66 year history.
The fulltime student enrollment is expected to increase from 258 last year to 280 this year...
The faculty will total 30 as compared to 26 last year.”
The article introduces the new instructors as Gary L. Freeman and Stephen Robin in sculpture, James C. Hertter in visual communication, and pertinent to the discussion here, in printmaking, Margaret Fierke “who will teach etching.”
Within months of her arrival, Fierke will have an opportunity to discuss her art with an unnamed writer for The Indianapolis Star in an article appearing December 29, 1968.
The Week in Indiana Art column includes an image of her work, described as an acrylic painting in the article, Omphalos.
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Omphalos, Margaret 'Peg' Fierke |
The article quotes Fierke at length, providing an insight into her motivations and interests at this early stage of her post-collegiate career,
“I am not protesting any wars or social conditions in my paintings and prints...
Rather, I create images in illusionary space which can't happen in actual space...I can draw something floating in space. I can make things transparent so that I can break the rules of what actually happens.”
The writer describes the quasi-organic imagery contained in many of Fierke's creations, a subject matter and style dubbed as 'organic surrealism' by a former Herron faculty member not named. The article describes the look as “...a juxtaposition of primitive life forms with mechanistic environmental elements.”
Fierke is further quoted, explaining the commingling of her design elements,
“All of this juxtaposing occurs on the two dimensional surface of a painting, drawing or print.
Therefore, any suggestion of space...is illusionary space. Within this illusionary space there can be ambiguities and occurrences which are contrary to physical reality.”
Even though stated so early in her career, Fierke's exploration of an organic and yet illusory space will continue, as we shall see.
The article concludes with a list of many of Fierke's early-career awards and achievements, too numerous to list here.
Energetic Exhibition of Illusionary Space.
It was as she hit the ground running here in the city – a momentum and stride she would maintain over the following first months and years while teaching and producing art.
As early as February 1969 several significant developments in her career were reported in the papers.
Fierke received a cash prize award for a drawing she exhibited at the American Drawing Biennial at the Norfolk (VA) Museum of Arts and Sciences as reported in The Indianapolis News February 8.
On February 10, Fremont Power, a writer for the same paper, in his self-named column reported the art gallery start-up, Editions Ltd., and its first scheduled show for February 22 and 23 at the temporary location of Woodland Springs clubhouse near 116th and Keystone on the city's north side.
Power reports Mrs. Robert S. (Joanne) Chappell and Joan Talesnick were business partners in the venture, both of whom had a a background in the arts and art education with studies at Indiana University.
Numerous artists would be participating in the first show with artworks numbering between 225 and 250 pieces. The column confirms Fierke's participation, along with other Herron faculty including Robert Eagerton and Gary Freeman.
In the February 16 Indianapolis Star, The Week In Indiana Art column, the Editions Ltd. First show is again previewed, along with a Fierke update,
“The Boston Printmakers 21st annual exhibition, March 4 to 30, will show a color intaglio print by Miss Margaret Fierke, lecturer at Herron...
'Omphalos,' the print, will be shown at the juried exhibition at Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
It won honorable mention in the Lafayette (Ind.) Art Center's 7th annual regional exhibition ...Another (Fierke) etching called 'Medallion' (is) also in that show.”
Just a couple of months later, The Indianapolis News, on April 10, would report on Fierke's continuing busy exhibition schedule as follows,
“Miss Margaret Fierke...will show an etching in the 21st national exhibition of prints in Washington's Library of Congress May 1 to Sept. 2. The print is entitled 'The Creation.'
The artist also has works in exhibitions in Wichita, Kan.; Terre Haute; Ypsilanti, Mich., and Dickinson, N.D.”
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| The Creation, Margaret 'Peg' Fierke |
An exhibition Young Printmakers 1970 opened at the Herron Museum of Art on February 2 of that year, as part of a Indiana University's Sesquicentennial celebration.
The show was previewed by Indianapolis News writer Lorraine Price. The pictorial article contained an interview with Robert Eagerton, chairman of Herron's printmaking department discussing the booming art print market at the time, the advantages of the print medium and the means and methods of creating such works.
Several photographs of students at work complete the article, including Betsey Bly, Becky Depositar, Vivian Morton, Donald Clanton and Peg Fierke.
This article, we see, refers to Ms. Fierke as 'Peg,' the name most familiar in Indianapolis art circles from that time forward.
A photograph shows her engrossed in her work engraving, as she bends her head over a copper plate. (See News photo by Jim Young at top of page)
A Formation Formed of Form.
A work produced by Fierke at this time was the etching Three Sided Gravity. It was a purchase award winner in the 13th North Dakota Annual Print and Drawing Exhibition at the University of North Dakota in April 1970.
(A work by that same name is currently in the collection of Newfields, listed as ink on paper, etching and aquatint, created in 1969, inscribed as 1/10 and can be seen here.)
The print defies easy explanation. It is a combination of flat, empty and three-dimensional space, of two-tone and color. The collage of its imagery changes as the eye darts about. From surreal to cartoonish to schematic.
It may seem part Rube Goldberg and part M. C. Escher, but that's grasping at straws. It's hard to describe something so confusing and different looking. Looking back, we know now, it was, in whole, a Peg Fierke.
As mentioned earlier, Fierke was among the first artists to be represented by the new Editions Ltd. gallery in Indianapolis. She was also to be among the last artists represented in a show at the Herron Gallery at its longstanding 16th Street location. By the autumn, the gallery would relocate and be rechristened at a brand new location at 1200 West 38th Street as the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
The show was called Indiana Prints/ Drawings/Watercolors.
Winners in each category were chosen by juror Charles C. Savage, curator of education at City Art Museum of St. Louis. First in Watercolors was Louise Johnson, first in Prints was Sharon Sklar and first in Drawings was Robert J. Cutter Jr.
Fierke's Three Sided Gravity would continue its winning ways and earn a third place award in the Prints category in the show.
Peg Fierke also created two interesting constructions around this time. We can be sure of at least two, as they are currently on display in the Herron School of Art and Design exhibition in their Marsh Gallery.
The retrospective exhibit, Evidence of Things Unseen – Margaret “Peg” Fierke: Prints, Paintings, and Patterns of Discovery, runs through August 1.
The constructions vaguely remind one of Robert Rauschenberg assemblies, if only in their unusual combination of seemingly unrelated materials and techniques that are difficult to describe, and exist somewhere between painting and sculpture. And also in their post Ab Ex figuration.
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Untitled, Margaret 'Peg' Fierke, in the exhibition at Herron Galleries |
Fierke's two pieces are somewhere between concept and drawing, abstract and meaning.
She has moved her 2D works to the at least the next dimension. They are drawings, maybe, but with a dose of her smoke and mirrors.
Since there are two specimens, seemingly of the same species, an attempt at pattern recognition can be at least attempted by the viewer.
A fallback is to again quote the earlier unnamed Indianapolis Star writer who described some of Fierke's work in 1968 as “...a juxtaposition of primitive life forms with mechanistic environmental elements.” That description would seem apropos to what one sees in the two constructions.
Both are listed as Plexiglass, ink and paper. Both contain an obsessive pattern of circles drawn to form a tight mesh in ink. Try as I might with my eyesight, I don't know. Were there ink marks on the Plexi itself, casting shadows onto the paper? Or was it layers of various colored ink creating a strange shallow volume to the plane.
True to her word, there is certainly something illusionary about Fierke's space.
The additional drawing elements in the two works, besides the woven-mat effects described, are of that commingling of organic and mechanistic forms.
Pipes, brackets, guide-wires – even a shower head – versus bulbous, organic somethings or the other.
Perhaps difficult to describe, but a recognizable style for Fierke was beginning to take shape.
Classroom Happening.
In addition to her energetic exhibition schedule, Fierke's growing popularity as a Herron instructor is noted in another pictorial article about her appearing in the December 26, 1970, Indianapolis News. The article describes Fierke's unorthodox, at times, teaching methods, popular with her students,
“In a drawing class this year, Miss Fierke projected color slides onto a model's body while hard-rock music played in the background. The students naturally loved it, and Miss Fierke, just as naturally, is regarded as one of the most popular instructors at Herron.”
The article has several photographs of Fierke at work in her studio, doing drawing studies of seashells and using an airbrush on a large painting, as examples. The photo spread provides insight into her interests and working methods at this time.
The painting is not named, and its whereabouts are unknown, but we see in the photograph, it is in the ballpark of style of her wonderfully weird Three Sided Gravity.
An examination of Peg Fierke's art in the 1970s and 1980s will continue in Part Two of this series to follow.
Mark Diekhoff, July 2026
See Also: Herron Galleries
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