Patrick the First, King of Mass Ave – Part Two

Candy Land and the Avenue of Dreams.

Massachusetts Avenue, a diagonal running street on the downtown's near Northeastside, had a long history of attracting dreamers and schemers, up-and-comers and those down on their luck. Some times things worked out, and even for a long time, some times they didn't.  

A young immigrant named Nick Banos would find his way to Massachusetts Avenue in the late-1910s. Leaving Greece at age fifteen, he passed through Ellis Island, and then by train across the country, heading to St. Louis, where his cousin and sponsor, Jim Zapapas, worked in a candy store. By the time he arrived in Missouri, young Banos learned that his cousin had relocated to a confectionery shop in Indianapolis. So he took his cousin's place and worked at the candy shop in St. Louis, learning the trade for a few years, until war broke out, and he joined the U.S. Army. He served in World War I until Armistice Day, then relocated to Indiana and worked with his cousin in his candy store, located on Massachusetts Avenue. His story and his subsequent years running his own store, the Candy Kitchen, for 61 years, in Franklin, Indiana, is detailed in an August 30, 1983 article by Mike Redmond in The Indianapolis News.   

Banos' sweet American dream is perhaps typical of the risk, the sacrifice, the hard work and opportunity required for success in the hard-knock world of private enterprise that built the original flourish along Massachusetts Avenue. Businesses such as Stout's Shoes, the Marott Department Store, Haag Drug Store and many others, thrived for decades.

During this 20th Century boom, the most impressive flat-iron skyscraper in the city, once the city's tallest, The Knights of Pythias Building, towered 11 stories above the corner of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts at the gateway to the Avenue. It was a majestic presence at the 200 block from 1907 until its demolition in 1967. 

One nearby flatiron was to survive Ed Zebrowski's wrecking ball; the Hammond Block at 75 Massachusetts Avenue at New York Street. Originally a school and offices after its 1874 construction, the Italianate three-story would devolve into a liquor store and fishing bait and tackle until it was eventually vacant and slated for demolition by the late 1970s.  

By that time, the area was blighted. Most storefronts were boarded. Stout Shoes was about the only remaining business from the heyday years.  

An Indianapolis Star editorial, Avenue of Dreams, appeared in the November 27, 1980 edition. It signaled, if not restoration of Massachusetts Avenue, at least perhaps, a revitalization of that dream,

“Not many Hoosiers remember the years when Massachusetts Avenue was a grand view, but it once was and it soon will begin to take on a new grandeur.

In those day, famous actors could be seen walking down the sidewalk toward the Murat Theater. The avenue was not only a showplace but a main thoroughfare for people living on the Northeastside and a principle road out of the city. 

Then came an age of blight which lasted for many years.

Now a project is in the works to develop condominiums, apartments, and office and shopping space in the 300 block. 

If all goes well, and it should, the first block of Massachusetts Avenue will soon be a    showplace again and a place where people can enjoy the city's unique charm.” 

And then it would begin.  

Attorney Henry J.  Price would purchase the Hammond Block and begin its renovation at the very gateway to Massachusetts Avenue in 1979. And as early as 1982, a lightly refurbished apartment building such as the Massala at 345 Massachusetts Avenue was renting apartments for as low as $100 a month. Budget minded students, living on the upper floors of the apartment building,while Brother Junipers restaurant had dual storefronts on both Mass Ave and Alabama Street. 

Not long after, Scott Keller would begin buying storefronts in the 400 block with a savvy business plan in mind for the renovation of the Avenue.  It would involve willing, even eager, co-conspirators in the world of art, as he relayed  to writer, Will Higgins, in a June 26, 2014 article in The Indianapolis Star, 

“We wanted the galleries in there to start everything off,” said...Keller, a real-estate developer who in 1980 began buying vacant Mass Ave. storefronts, cheaply. 

“We wanted a lot of retail; we wanted independent restaurants of quality. Art galleries got people to visit the area, generated interest, so we rented to them very inexpensively.”

Someone had to be the first of the willing and eager. And it was Patrick King.

427 Massachusetts Avenue. 

Patrick King Contemporary Art opened to the public in October 1982 will daily hours Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

King sat down with Indianapolis News writer Marion Garmel for an October 30, 1982 feature that includes his photograph sitting in a director's chair in the middle of his new gallery installed with art.  Garmel describes the King Contemporary style in the article,

“Nothing in King's gallery vies for attention with the art. The floors are polished wood; the walls white.”

She quotes King about his thinking, when it comes to presentation, 

“You're dealing with professional people, they have years of experience, some of their work is in museums, in prestige galleries...You don't cram it in three and four deep.”

King talks about his approach in working with artists as well,

“The primary responsibility of the dealer is to deal with the artist...I guess I look at art the way you look at people – and I don't want to get it confused with judging a book by its cover.  You have to open yourself completely, you to them and they to you. You want that experience, that new experience. I would not treat their art any less that I would treat them.” 

Garmel begins her article calling King an angry young man, and then let's him explain. He gets worked up about how art and artists are treated, often neglected, by the interior designers who settle for  posters in place of original art,

“The era of the poster is beginning to disappear. That was the 1960s...You don't sell posters to corporate offices anymore...What people want in corporate offices is lots of good art – like an oasis where they can stop in the midst of a hectic day of word processing and contemplate.” 

King seems to be wishing into existence a business market of dream clients for his new enterprise. His thoughts indicate an acute awareness of the business of art, the marketing of art, perhaps a good thing, if not great, for one starting just such a business.  

Steve Mannheimer would cover King's first exhibit in a column in The Indianapolis Star, November 21, 1982, headlined, Strong show opens gallery.   The column begins, about King himself,

“Patrick King has paid his dues to the Indianapolis art scene. First...as assistant director of the Herron Gallery...Then...a similar stint at Editions Limited.

...King's opening show...is a strong selection of 19 pieces by five artists. As might be expected from King's mixed background at both the avant-garde and commercial poles of the art world, he prefers to sit comfortably in the middle.

Yet he does lean a bit to the left. Although none of the pieces in the gallery is artistically radical to the point of controversy, they are all a far hue and cry from conservative.”

Mannheimer goes on to review the artworks by each of the five men in the show, artists Fred Struther, Will Northerner, Skip Koebbeman, David McCullough and Thomas Keesee.

About King's eye as gallerist, Mannheimer finishes his column,

“Patrick King has chosen his first show wisely. Although united by a refined predilection for funk, these works span the emotional spectrum from orange hot to blue funk. What we may reasonably expect from King in the future is not necessarily the quirky, but rather the subtle ability to define such nuance in a variety of contemporary directions.” 

Something Happening Here.

Over the following weeks of 1982 and into 1983, Patrick King Contemporary Art was to be the sole art gallery in operation on Massachusetts Avenue.  King's early success, if not in sales, was in critical coverage by newspaper writers. The continuous stream of articles, many with photos of art, likely fueled the art dreams of artist and would-be dealer alike. Not to mention, the real estate developers. 

According to a January 4, 1983, Indianapolis News editorial, an area of several blocks along Massachusetts Avenue had been placed on the National Register of Historic Places. This designation, along with the recently passed Reaganomics of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, provided tax breaks for real estate development involving just such properties. 

Looking back, it seems clear. The parts were in place for momentum to build. The future was so bright, well, you know, even at night.

Patrick King ruled the art avenue for the day and the weeks to follow, delivering show after show that generated buzz. Lyman-Snograss Gallery, near Herron on Delaware Street, although not in the Mile Square, was close enough to downtown, and contemporary enough in its exhibitions, to also to play a part in the burgeoning scene. And although the nearby Lockerbie Gallery on the 400 block of N East Steeet had definitely closed by January 1983, as reported by gallery owner Barbara Stokely, their longtime framer, James Cunningham, and his artist wife Kate, inspired by Patrick King, were looking at buildings on Massachusetts Avenue, to continue the Lockerbie legacy.

The head of steam Patrick King was generating on Massachusetts Avenue was not confined to artists, would-be dealers and real estate developers. Writers with a nose for a story were inspired to take a look.

In March 1983, Tom Lundberg Textiles was presented at Patrick King. The show was previewed with a short write-up and image in the Marion Garmel Indianapolis News column on March 4. But is was the column a couple of days later in The Indianapolis Star, on March 6, by Charles Ferruzza, a young, Butler journalism grad, and freelance writer, that covered the fiber art show with enthusiasm and panache,

“Thinking about miniature embroideries conjures up images of grandmother, chamomile tea and cross stitch. But the 20 silk embroideries by Thomas Lundberg, on display...(at) Patrick King Contemporary Art, prove the traditional art  of stitched design has, in fact, been liberated from the sitting room.

Lundberg...spoke of his needlework pictures during the exhibit opening as ' personal metaphors.' Indeed, autobiography and travel experiences are the predominant themes in Lundberg's self-conscious pieces, rendering them as intimate as an open diary.”  

Ferruzza goes on to describe the miniature 'samplers,' of what Lundberg calls “everyday play distilled,” (the pieces were tiny sized,  2 ½ inches by 4 ½ inches),

“...all of Lundberg's pieces are rather reminiscent of the Woodstock era, multicolored embroidered patches worn as 'strawberry statements' on jeans and denim vests. Lundberg, however, seems determined to avoid such associations, by presenting his works in large frames, complete with elegant unbleached cotton mats, and hanging them in an even line along the gallery's white walls.”

But his strong sense of narrative works against this imposed austerity. The even line has a distracting tendency to become a series of cartoon panels.

...Yet even if his diary might be a comic book, Lundberg describes a magical realm within its covers. And under those covers, his dream net captures fragments of a tradition associated with lavender, old lace and bed pulls – if not bell bottoms – while still managing to bring forth embroideries as modern and universally personal as a Polaroid snapshot.” 

A later exhibit at Patrick King, was Suite Metropolis: New York, Washington and Indianapolis – Photography by Janica Yoder.

Again Ferruzza would return his attention to Patrick King when wrote a detailed review that appeared in The Star on May 8. The review was more critical in tone, but still thoughtful in its observation, 

“As much as the show's title conjures the symphonic abundance and hubbub of urban life, this series of Cibachrome process prints contradicts our expectations.

...In Ms. Yoder's metropolitan fairy tale, New York City is a wild-eyed Cinderella and Washington, D.C. and Indianapolis, to varying degrees, are her dim-witted stepsisters.

New York springs to life as a focus of movement and unbridled energy; teen-agers on the streets, graffiti on the walls – attractively lurid, potentially dangerous.

...Washington...carries and entirely different tone: formidable, imposing and cold.  Highly formal, painfully reverent,  and elegant in a rather glossy 'National Geographic' mode.

Indianapolis is ...flat, stodgy, and oh so middle class...a spread-out stuffy suburb of kitschy concrete toy palaces, phony haciendas, and crackerbox model homes.”

Ferruzza gives a little, then takes away more, in his summation of the show,

“Although most viewers should find Suite Metropolis visually sumptuous, the implied commentary will come across as, if not insincere, simply uninspired. Janica Yoder is certainly master of her craft, if not her genre.”

Barbara Stokely, director/owner of the former Lockerbie Gallery, a stone's throw from King's location, would  become a freelance art writer appearing in The Star around the same time that her former framer and his artist wife, James and Kate Cunningham, would rent a storefront at 318 Massachusetts,  in a building owned by Harry Stout of Stout Shoe fame.  

Stokely's review of a show by Ronald Markman at Patrick King would appear in the September 18 edition of The Star. The exhibit consisted of colorful paintings on wood surrounded by humorous cartoon doodles, all by the Brooklyn-born, I.U. Bloomington instructor. Her column begins with a quote from the artist, as Markman admits about his art, “Sometimes I just can't control myself.”

From her description of the show, it does sound a bit out there in part, and obsessive in part, kind of a bi-polar two-person in one-man show.  Consisting of eleven painted wood constructions surrounded around their perimeters by comics, or etchings, or doodles – it's not clear – of a cast characters the artist draws for laughs. But with a caveat; “I don't want to be clever, just funny,” Stokely writes, quoting his words. 

Stokely further notes that Markman credits the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin as influences of his cast of goofy figures. He tells the writer that he has doodled since his childhood, when he dreamed of being a cartoonist. And he has been populating a make-believe land called Mufka since his Fulbright Scholar days decades prior. 

It is purported, in the column, that those comic influences infiltrate his painted wood constructions as well. The painted wood constructions that sound somewhat dull and rickety, compared to his fantasy land of doodad drawings,

“All of Markman's (paintings) consist of layered repetition of shapes and frames within frames. It is hard not to notice, however, that these frames are somewhat causally constructed without properly mitered corners or any congruent precision.”

Markman's explanation to the writer, 

“...I'm not too handy with a saw...(describing his first attempts, but eventually)...The result was the way things were meant to be  and this is ultimately what I wanted.”

Considering Markham trained under Josef Albers at Yale for four years, it is no wonder he aspired to a hard edge and geometrical perfection at first. And if he was not there yet in his paintings on wood, they could exist in a limbo between Albers' precision and his own Mufka's mayhem,  in the limbo of King's white walls.    

Between dreamy chaos and conceptual perfection is the place of living, of action and of experimentation. 

Art  is a laboratory haunted by time, and galleries gather the ghosts. The spirit of art, creator of worlds. Past, present and future, failures and successes. And some just plain old attempts. 

Patrick, the first on Mass Ave, alive and well, at the end of one year. Time is space. Space is time. The power of love, of money, pauses to breath between notes. Forms from the shadows of skid row, would be coming for him soon...  

Mark Diekhoff, December 2025

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.

Patrick the First, King of Mass Ave – Part One

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.” 

Turrell's Avaar was held over at Herron Gallery, and was part of the exhibit Illusions, in September,  that also included paintings by Paul Sarkisian, constructions by John Okulick and a tunnel installation by Thomas Macaulay. Garmel further reports that the “endlessly fascinating” Avaar would remain in the gallery, even after the rest of Illusions was taken down. Patrick King, in his role as assistant curator, advised her that it would remain for an indefinite time. 

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.

Garmel further detailed the gallery operation,

“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.

Was King attempting provocation by the title? For years, decades, centuries – the art world had called a still life a still life and a figural was a figural. But figural was a subset of figurative, turns out.  Figurative being a sort of inside baseball art history term for a work based on any actual object. 

The label may have caused the art writer for The Indianapolis Star, Donn Fry, to scratch his head, and to search for some further understanding, as evidenced in the opening words of his  February 15, 1981, Art World column review of the show,

“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

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.

Art Collection of Irvington Historical Society

Self Portrait by William F. Kaeser

Exhibit of Artworks from the Irvington Historical Society Collection

Currently at the Bona Thompson Center, is the exhibit An Artistic Legacy: Selections from the Irvington Historical Society Collection.  The show presents a selection of artworks from its permanent collection or on loan. 

The show coincides with the concurrent exhibit The Lost Photographs of Osbert Sumner, which continues at the same location.

Works include historic examples by members of the Irvington Group which was active from 1928 through 1937, and noteworthy pieces by more recent and contemporary artists, most with strong ties to Irvington.

Installation view detail from An Artistic Legacy show,
including Dorothy Morlan's Grey Landscape, far left

A wonderful Dorothy Morlan painting, of what may be a bend of the Ohio River, shows a bluff above a couple of cottage roofs, covered in snow, looking down over a vast river valley. The picture, Grey Landscape in this hanging, is called In the Valley (Harmony in Gray), 1933, in the book Skirting the Issue by Newton and Weiss. It is indeed musical in its interplay of varying shades of blue and gray, from very light in the skies and on the water, to more medium gray in the distant river banks, and finally a turquoise in the foreground that hosts a few thin trees that cling to a few leaves on the uppermost tips of their branches. The artist was painting near the Ohio in this period, as her Through the Trees Near Hanover appeared in the 36th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at the Richmond (IN) Art Museum in 1934.

There are two portraits of Irvington Group painter William Kaeser. One is his own Self Portrait, c. 1960, showing him at middle age, graying hair, smoking a pipe wearing a gray cardigan sweater. The canvas is brightened and its mood enlivened by the bright orange shirt he wears, and the way it plays off the small painting's teal background. Most known for his early social realistic landscapes and circus motifs, the portrait displays his sure and fluid handling of paint, where his transitions from light to shade appear skillfully executed by his touch.

Portrait of William Kaeser by Cecil Head

The second Portrait of William Kaeser, c. 1940. is by Cecil Head. Although Head did not exhibit in the Irvington Group shows, the Whiteland artist had a long association with Kaeser. They shared studio space, along with Indianapolis artist Floyd Hopper, in downtown Indianapolis on Market Street in their early days in the 1930s, and continued to exhibit together in their final years some forty years later, in a group they called The Five. 

Head's portrait shows Kaeser nearly life-size, as a young artist smoking a pipe. The play of light and shadow seems the primary study of the painting, with Kaeser's white shirt collar, the side of his neck and face and the glint off the stem of the pipe catching the brightest attention of the artist's brush. Kaeser's face, turned away, is lost in the shadow of the dark surrounding background. The portrait is similar to a self portrait by Head, and a portrait of he did of Hopper, from the same period, both exhibited decades later at the Southside Art League.

Sycamores on West Farm by Frederick Polley

Another Irvington Group artist, Frederick Polley, is well represented in the show, with three works of three varying media; painting, etching and drawing. The artist revealed his own art origins in a 1920s newspaper article that was profusely illustrated with many of his etchings. Working as a telegraph operator in a small Illinois town, he observed an artist, new to town, sketching various buildings for a feature in the newspaper. He was inspired to try his hand at sketching and found that he had talent for drawing buildings. It was a discovery and a passion that would lead to his own career in future years, when he provided etchings and drawings to be published in the Indianapolis Sunday Star across from the editorial page, for years.

In this exhibit, his colorful oil painting, Sycamores on West Farm, is first to capture one's attention with its color. The autumn scene is of a rolling slope of foreground, so often seen with him, and in this picture, a retreating row of sycamores. The gleaming white bark is bright in sunshine, amid an otherwise warm study of the fading colors as summer turns to winter. Tan and beige ground, some final yellow leaves, brown shadows and dark orange treelines in the hazy gray distance.

Polley's etching, Getting Out in the Country, c. 1927, was one his works that appeared in the Sunday Star.  There is a poetry to his composition of a towering, almost foreboding, tree on one side, mirrored by its diminutive twin on the other, in the deep, receding perspective. Between the two, the tiny hamlet of a farm –  house, barn, shade tree and split rail fence –  that huddles beneath the open expanse of open sky.  The etching portrays the same rolling topography that is familiar in many Polleys, with the massive foreground tree atop a grassy rise that plunges the eye toward the more distant and detailed narrative of the homestead at the center the piece. 

 

The Ice House, Irvington by William Lawson

A current view of Irvington, by a current resident artist, is seen in the oil painting The Ice House, Irvington, 2019, by William Lawson.  Born in Indianapolis, he studied at Herron, and currently maintains a studio on an upper floor of the historic drug store building at the intersection of Bonna and Audubon. Lawson has been painting in Irvington since his return to Indiana in 2018 after living and painting in Seattle, Washington for a number of years.

Lawson paints his Ice House, not from Ritter Avenue facing the street, but from the other side, along the railroad tracks behind the building. He often finds points of interest off the beaten track as his many paintings of the city's alleyways attest.  Views aside railroad tracks are also recur in works by this artist over the years. The light of early spring is captured as it shines on the simple, harmonious color of the scene.  The red block tower contrasts with the emerging grass. The precise stiffness of the telephone poles and roof-lines is softened by the thin billow of clouds, the fuzzy treeline in the distance and the dusty gravel along the tracks.  An old tire and other litter are not unsightly, but noteworthy to his brush. The railroad tracks do not escape, but run through. They seem to summon somewhere. Either direction, come or go, something else to see.

North Arlington Avenue at Pleasant Run by Rachel May Blount Conner

Perhaps the oldest painting of the neighborhood in the collection is Rachel May Blount Conner's North Arlington Avenue Bridge at Pleasant Run, 1885. The rustic scene, painted in a self-taught folk art style, may first appear alien to any current views at that location.  But walks along the creek in the area of Pleasant Run Golf Course do show the similar details of exposed tree roots along the washed away creek-side and eroded walls on steep inclines beside the water. The open green surrounded by trees like in her painting still exist in the southern edge of the golf course today.  The main interest in the painting is its capture of the rudimentary bridge and its stone block abutments at either end that traversed the creek at that time.

The Bona Thompson Center by Ginny Taylor Rosner

The Bona Thompson Center, 2007, a gum bichromate photograph on Lanaquarelle paper by Ginny Taylor Rosner was part of a series of works created of Irvington landmarks for the former Legends Restaurant. The work, abstracted by its extreme close up presentation, shows vines growing up the side of the building and is a study in cream yellow and green.  

Robert Selby's 1929, The Forsyth's Backyard is wildly painted with expressive slashing strokes. The picture captures the spring season with pink blossoming trees and bright new leaves. Selby exhibited with the Irvington Group, and was son-in-law to William Forsyth and brother-in-law to Constance Forsyth, both of whom are also represented in this show. The Backyard is of the Forsyth home at the corner of Washington Street and Emerson Avenue, which is the location of a gas station today.

The exhibit also contains work by three other Irvington Group members, all watercolor landscapes. Clifton Wheeler's Hillside with Cabin, Hilah Drake Wheeler's Devil's Gultch – Estes Park,  and Charles George Yeager's Untitled view of a village beside a lake surrounded by rocky hills.

Benton House by Kathleen Biale

The exhibited collection also includes works by Harry Davis, John Wesley Hardrick, Florence Bartley Smithburn, Patte Owings, James Lynch, E. Roger Frey, Kathleen Biale, Phyllis Zimmerman, and Carl Zimmerman. and continues through the end of the year.  

Mark Diekhoff, November 2025

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'Irvington Group' Artists at Auction 2025

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Historic Irvington Group Artists at Auction –  Autumn, 2025 

Several fine art auctions in central Indiana held in the summer and fall of this year were to feature a number of beautiful works by artists of local interest, now known as the Irvington Group. A series of annual exhibitions by artists living in or near historic Irvington were held from 1928 to 1937, sponsored by the neighborhood's Union of Clubs. A total of seventeen different artists from that era were to participate in the shows over the years.

Frederick Polley, a painter, etcher, lithographer and art instructor, and longtime Indianapolis Star contributor, lived on South Emerson Avenue in those days. He was recently represented by his oil painting, Farm Workers, in the Jacksons Auction & Real Estate Company sale in June of Outstanding Indiana, American & European Art.

Farm Workers depicts the laborers, two each, both man and beast, standing together atop a pink clay mound of bare earth at the forefront of the picture. A single tree in the green of high summer provides scant shade for the men and their plow horses. The locale could be Brown County with its gently rolling slopes of yellow grain and distant blue forested hills. The figures and animals are painted with thin dark outlines which serve to emphasize their placement in a painting otherwise dreamy and sketchy and colored in soft hazy hues.

A small watercolor  by Clifton Wheeler called Smokey Mountains  Landscape was offered at the same sale. The artist lived on Lowell Avenue with wife Hilah Drake Wheeler, also an artist. 

The watercolor is typical of Wheeler's main oeuvre of hilly and forested views of the eastern United States.  His landscapes usually pack the entirety of the realistic detail before his eyes into the picture. As a painter of summer, he mastered all shades of green and all shapes of trees.  A white homestead seems tiny, dwarfed by towering trees that roll slightly with the land before the green peak of a mountain, central to the composition.

A lovely contrast in color, technique and subject is seen in the small watercolor by Constance Forsyth painted in 1928, Industrial Scene. Forsyth, daughter of William Forsyth, lived at the family home on South Emerson Avenue (at Washington Street).

The colors in Industrial Scene are mainly two – a green for the tree and some grass, and a brick red for the linear mesh of the complex industrial building and its works. The organic features are brushed in soft, curving strokes whereas the complex, woven hodgepodge of the building is jabbed and jotted in a series of tightly intersecting marks. 

An auction, also by Jacksons, Fall 2025 Sale of Historic Indiana Art, was held on November 1, and included works of the Irvington Group. Again, in this sale, are works by Clifton Wheeler, but also paintings by William Forsyth and by Robert Selby, who married Forsyth's youngest daughter, Evelyn.

Selby's Floral Still Life, 1939, is an oil painting distinctive for the pure black of the background behind a tall silver tea pot holding a multi color of gladiolas and yellow daisies. Three green apples, one seriously overripe, complete the composition atop a brown wooden table. The mood is somber in the picture, almost funereal, due to the bleak darkness of the background and the strange gaping brown spot on the bad apple almost screaming in the shape of its blemish.

Clifton Wheeler's painting Little River, 1951, depicts a winding roadway view alongside a stream in what must be the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. The sunny roadway and its precise post and wire fence snake from front to middle of the painting which is also composed of carefully noted cedars and other bright foliage. Increasingly hazy blue mountains cascade in the distance.  Some rapids in the water and a hillside farm are the whitest bits to center the eye.

Forsyth Home (Irvington), painted in oil by William Forsyth, shows a gray autumn day, at that moment when the trees are changing to yellow, but the lower bushes still retain their green. A carpet of leaves fallen and orange cover the ground of what may be a piece of Forsyth's yard. The home is just a a slender bit of the corner of the building in deep perspective – windows, a door, some steps below and what may be a balcony rail above. The artist plays with the few colors before him, yellow, orange and brown, gray-blue and green. The stucco white wall mutely reflecting some of the color back on the overcast day, with a sky like a gray sun in a large circle formed by the curving boughs of the tree.

Another William Forsyth painting, In the Spring, 1917,  may show a small patch of garden or lawn, strewn with the decaying purple brown leaves of the prior season. It being spring, new green shoots emerge and a couple of sprigs of early season flowers, purple crocus and yellow daffodil dominate the canvas in the foreground.

Finally, Jackson's Hoosier Salon Endowment Art Auction occurred November 7. Clifton Wheeler, Frederick Polley and William Forsyth all had works represented in this sale.

William Forsyth as a srudent

A watercolor by William Forsyth, Autumn Landscape, 1896, seems impossibly modern in color given the date of its creation.  The diffuse brightness of its hues appear symbolic and abstract. Perhaps just darker paint that has faded over time. A few trees dominate the vertical painting, back-lit with yellow leaves, casting pink milky shadows toward the viewer.

A relatively rare, almost treeless, landscape by Clifton Wheeler is aptly titled A Lone Tree. The  sunny stone mountainside of the fir tree would suggest a location in the west. But the hills behind are rolling and green so it may be somewhere rocky in the east. The high drama of the trees footing amid the shadowed crags of a steep cliff-side dominate the right side of the picture, with clouds and sky and distant mountains on the left. 

 A small but elegant etching by Frederick Polley, Landscape with Trees, may show a winter scene of a few trees atop a grassy slope, as some trees appear evergreen cedars, whereas others shadow them with skeletal and lace-like bareness. His fine touch of minimal impression registers as a few delicate, thin lines sketch in the hilly countryside beyond the trees.

A companion painting by Polley, Indiana Hillside Landscape, contains a dream-like effect as its color could almost be moonlight upon the hills.  Some trees are burnt orange as if autumn, and one is spring green, although the treeline in the distance gives the impression of early winter. It is a mysterious little masterpiece in mainly shades of brown. 

Mark Diekhoff, November 2025

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'Comfort' by Philip Campbell at Harrison Center

Comfort by Philip Campbell, Harrison Center, Indianapolis

Audience Participation Overdose Trauma.

Longtime Indianapolis artist Philip Campbell, most known for his wood carvings, exhibited his interactive installation, Comfort, at Harrison Center in October. The artwork consisted of a fabric-clad hospital bed surrounded by a similar colorful quilt that curtained the space around the bed. The familiar appearing patchwork design evokes the ambiance of grandma's house, antique malls, rocking chairs and prayer.

The fiber art in both components was composed of sewn together rectangular fragments from common clothing items such as denim jeans. The jeans were key, as they retained their pockets. The pockets were for the audience participation part of the post modern artwork, evoking social themes related to drug addiction such as overdose, rehab and recovery.

Inspired by hospital emergency rooms overwhelmed by opioid cases, Campbell has softened the anguish of the all too often endpoint of addiction by clothing the sterile environment in the well worn comfort clothes of people who were once patients or in narcotic withdrawal recovery. The use of quilted fabric echoes an earlier epidemic of suffering by evoking memory of the world's largest community folk art project, the AIDS memorial quilt.

Comfort in a Name.

Comfort is a metaphor for the very real phenomenon of something the artist refers to as the 'pink cloud' effect of early drug addiction recovery, where there is a feeling of euphoric well-being as the patient, surrounded by a recovery team, and perhaps hopeful family and friends, begins to shed the outer layers of destructive addictive behaviors and self-destructive rationalizations in an effort to begin the healing process. Pink clouds, like all clouds, are transitory though. The patient must be braced for the long haul and difficult times ahead.

The interactive feature invited gallery viewers to fill out memorial cards with the names of personal lives lost to addiction. Then to exchange the cards with the ephemera and paraphernalia, all too familiar to the addict, in the pockets. A 12-step plan outline or a Narcan nasal spray swapped for the name of one who has no use for such things anymore.

The comfort, then, for the many people affected by the loss of those who did not survive the pink cloud and its aftermath, is the relic of their name on paper and some old clothes. With an American epidemic as common and widespread as apple pie, no matter how you slice it, or dress it up, especially since fentanyl, they are gone.

Comfort here, is both beautiful and sad – like graveyards and memories can be, but hospital rooms seldom are.

Comfort by Philip Campbell

Mark Diekhoff, November 2025 

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.