Patrick the First, King of Mass Ave – Part Three

Gemini AI for illustrative purposes only

King for a Day.

Was it all just a dream, a long, long, time ago, along a skid row close at hand? Where a fair-haired young man approached a non-existent art world with little more than a business plan and a packed resume of experience, and a dream.  

This part of his story, told as a fable, although deserving a serious treatise. But art histories usually yellow as clippings in the dusty scrapbooks of time.  Whereas, stories, who knows,  might live and breath the bad and good of their hero's journey, where the quest is the destination, because the present is not a place, it's the kingdom of one's life. So head on pillow, read to me, and show me the pictures...

That...once upon a realm, Patrick King Contemporary Art was heating up, lighting a fuse that would soon explode into a full-fledged scene of merry pranksters and banksters, artists and critics. An emerald-city of a place to draw archetypal characters to its glow –  throne usurpers and pretenders, courtiers and the great unwashed...

To tell it another way...

If a painting was like a football, if only for a little while, that magic movement converging on Massachusetts Avenue was like a packed and crowded Hoosier Dome might be, about a year later, down the road near Union Station. 

A cavernous edifice, big as the Indiana sky, towering above all the crumbling asphalt and the corn. Filled with puffy, cloud-like thoughts of  buzz, and excitement and dreams, all along its small town, yellow road. And looking out, a hazy phantasmagoria, just passed the curve of the visible horizon...

The shade of a flat hand pressed to the forehead as a visor, not trembling, but barely unsteady, trying so hard in the bright sun  just to see. 

Down the way...yes...it's something...yes something is there...an art scene, maybe it is...like a tournament, in that place way yonder on, or way back when...with jousts and banners, fanfare and fancy clothes. 

But dropping the hand, and looking down at the ground beneath the feet. The art before art scene was a ever-changing shadow on the move.  Just a year or so until the start of the ball.  And when it starts, the timer's on. 

And then they would come for the king, like the boilermaker for the leprechaun. At the thundering Dome, with the first whistle, they would come. Some for the love of the game, some for the party, all for the wave. 

And just as Mass Ave, as the colorful mirage was beginning to be called, as the crest was breaking over  cracked sidewalks littered with booze bottles and smelling of, well, let just say the letter 'P'...

Just as as the crest poked above the sea-level of the local topography – the flat-line of the city's art trajectory of late – its gentle first spurtle offered hope. For a rising tide, even if tiny, lifts hope. 

But what kind of rising hope was this Pluto water to become – a tsunami, or just the wind-driven lapping of wavelets upon a small pond?  

And in what state, this H2O? Be it frozen, or an in-between flowing or a gas?  Time would tell.  

Its clock ticking toward midnight with every footstep and every heartbeat. With every bravo, and ring of the register, the echo of something more hollow, and grave. 

Until the next rainbow ends in the moon's caress, the tide's rising and falling assured to repeat in a cycle even older than oceans, but younger than the night. 

But for the moment of King's halcyon days, his remaining weeks and months as the sole ruler of Mass Ave, he kept floating his boat on whatever the water. 

Serene and majestic, Patrick, on his royal barque...  

Big Bang or Steady State?

Much as Patrick King's first year of shows seemed to be pleasing the local art writers, there were a couple of group shows that were shown by institutions that critics found disappointing. One was a first-ever show and the other was the penultimate of a long-standing and storied local biennial. The reviews were just a day apart, hours even, as one appeared in the evening Indianapolis News and the other in the next morning's Star.

The First Juried Exhibition sponsored by the Indianapolis Academy of Fine Arts was the source of Marion Garmel's vague disapproval.  She reviews the show in her June 25, 1983 News column, writing,

“It's a small show, ultimately disappointing, but it says a lot about the state of the current Indianapolis art scene and contemporary Indiana artists.”

Garmel goes on to describe the art and artists in the show, but is sketchy, at best, in describing the roots of what comes across as a very mild ire. She does say that many of the artists and artworks are of the orbit of Herron Art School. As such, works are repeated or similar to those already seen in student and faculty shows. Connecting styles of professors to students are noted, and obvious at times. Other than that, she does not specify her disappointment. 

Steve Mannheimer, in his criticism of the 69th Indiana Artists exhibit at Indianapolis Museum of Art, in the next day's Star, displayed the trickster in him.  The trickster, as agent of change, as soothsayer, when he observes and he prods. He begins his review with a shrug and sigh,

“There has got to be a better way. At this rate we're never going to figure out whether Indiana artists can really cut the mustard or will forever play catch-up ball with the rest of the country.”

He quotes the museum's director, Robert A. Yassin, in the exhibition's press release that touts work in the show as competitive with art in Chicago and New York galleries. Mannheimer's reaction after seeing the show was succinct,

“Hoosier kidding who?”

For Mannheimer, the show was an amalgam of good, and not so much. The good being, by and large, the award winners in the show. Explaining his reaction more thoroughly,

“What we get is something for everybody. What we don't get is any sense of that 'strong Indiana tradition,' unless said tradition consists  simply of being from Indiana.

The vast majority of the work simply does not live up to such praise...

The first two rooms of the south gallery are littered with lackluster paintings, unexceptional in either concept or execution. What competence does emerge is completely undercut by adjacent amateurism...”

But he also notes that, generally speaking, the prize winners are worthy, technically competent and visually interesting. So he doesn't just complain. And he offers alternatives to the exhibit's “scatter gun attack.” As ways to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, he suggests,

“...take the prize winners, all 20 of them, and invite them to fill the third floor (of IMA) with five or six of their best pieces. Such an exhibit would represent the state of the art of the state more succinctly and, more importantly, with greater individual depth....

But if the invitational approach sounds too limiting, another alternative might be to offer winners small, one-person shows throughout the year. The IMA contains several spaces ideal for a small show.

 ...yet another alternative...could be...theme shows. Would not a more discussable, and hence a more useful exhibit be achieved by, let's say, a survey of the best realistic work in the state one year and only surrealism or abstraction the next?”

Mannheimer had had his say. To what effect was yet to be seen.  

As the art world in Indianapolis was to evolve it would display the tenancies of any old universe. Most simply explained as competing and binary theories; Big Bang or Steady State?

Big Bang is easy enough to imagine, a scene that keeps growing and expanding; more art and more artists, more galleries, more patrons, more sales. 

Whereas Steady State is a closed system;  finite resources or energy, where the rise and fall of things overlap and overlap, until the stasis of an ever-promised equilibrium is once again perceived. That is to say, in such a system, the rise of art on Massachusetts Avenue would foretell a fall elsewhere, such as the many decade's old Indiana Artists show. 

Recall that Indianapolis swapped out the old County Courthouse for the new City County Building. Indianapolis was missing something of a big bang there, either resources or imagination, parking or a jail. It either could not or would not not sustain both a beautiful heritage and the dazzling future, in that example.

Pax Ars Rex...

Outside of theories, and bedtime stories, the real world lurks. And Patrick King Contemporary Fine Art concluded its first full calendar year with Patricia Campbell's The Modular Form in October 1983 and then Shadow, Spaces and the Real by Rick Paul in November.  

Marion Garmel reviewed Campbell's show in an October 21, 1983 Indianapolis News column,

 “(Patrick) King has carefully renovated his small gallery to best exhibit the hanging, flowing, curving works of fabric that Miss Campbell creates.”

And further, about the “architectural fabric constructions,”

 “They swing from ceiling to wall...(and) in alcoves lit from behind...

...Each is composed of identical 'modules,' usually pieces of cotton muslin stretched and shellacked till they crackle like paper, connected by wooden dowels and paper chord.”

And about the design and/or effect of the artworks,

“The pieces are obviously designed to fit into, yet soften the harshness of, contemporary architecture.

The regular repetition of modules is (quoting the artist) 'very geometric. It has a machine look. But the closer you get, you see it is handmade. You understand an artist made it, a machine didn't.' ” 

Barbara Stokely reviews Rick Paul's exhibition of six drawings and five wall constructions in her December 4, 1983, Indianapolis Star article.  Her comments about his drawings relate to his wall constructions as well,

“The imagery of these monochromatic illustrations on paper denotes mostly itself and rarely connotes other allusions.

...For Paul, the illusionistic conventions of painting and drawing become the subject...”

Stokely quotes the artist and his motives,

“I create illusion in dimension...but I don't want to build. In my drawings, I record sculptural ideas that can't be made. I have fantasies that can't be defined.”

She will also review Patrick King's following show, Sculpture Jam, in the February 4, 1984, Star,  

“While Sculpture Jam...may sound like an upbeat improvisation, the crowding together of all these works brings another meaning of 'jam' to mind.

Some of the pieces by the nine featured artists are fresh and new; more suffer from deja vu. King might have better served his artists by showing a little restraint and limiting the show to new work.

Several of the works by Skip Koebbeman, Valarie Eickmeier, Dale Traugott, Doug Calisch, Rick Paul and Gary Freeman have been seen in recent exhibitions at the Indianapolis Art League, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, or the Herron Gallery. IUPUI.”

She points out one egregious example, judging from her phraseology, 

“Overexposure for (Gary) Freeman's five maquettes for the American United Life sculpture competition has reached the point of diminishing returns... 

Freeman's Sally's Jams, a large, welded and bolted steel sculpture which dominates the center (placement in the show) is much more eloquent.” 

You get the sense from the newspaper coverage that Patrick King really hits the mark with his next show, Paintings by Joni Heide and Dennison Griffith, in March. Both Marion Garmel, toward the shows opening, and Steve Mannheimer, near the closing, have good things to say. 

In the March 9, 1984 News, Garmel writes,

“Pattern is the key to Joni Heidi's large paintings...Simplicity is the key to Dennison Griffith's. 

Yet the two, who each have maintained a sense of childish delight, work well together in the exhibit...”

About Heide's Hope to Tell You, she writes,

“...one of her liveliest works, (it) features a primitive four-legged dog with his flowered shadow on the right and a spangly costume, head area cut out for a real person to step behind, on the left. A small, enigmatic, figure of a woman seems to be sitting under a tree nearby, while dots and dashes, stripes and tumbling stick figures populate other areas.” 

 And about Ohio artist, Griffith, 

“His large paintings contain simple, large areas of vivid color heavily painted in acrylic, enamel and oil stick.

His largest and most serious painting provides a good example of how Griffith isolates portions of an image to emphasize the whole. It's called Beth – Pink on Gold, and is basically a nude.”

Garmel describes how the works interplay together in the show,

“Neither Griffith nor Miss Heide use three-dimensional perspective – their paintings are all on the surface. Yet the difference between them is readily apparent in two works hung side-by-side. Griffith's Deener is a bare table set with one glass, one knife and one napkin. Miss Heidi's version of the same scene, though untitled, is packed with cups, forks, dogs and a Matisse-like sense of gaiety.”

 Steve Mannheimer's review of the same show in the March 25 Star, is half part review, and half part sociology. About Heidi, he writes,

“Pieces like Hope to Tell You and (Untitled)...may seem too raucous or arbitrary at first. Their colors and pattern-filled composition come across like exploded plaid giftwrap on a Christmas morning aftermath.

Viewers will note that despite this...(they) are really warm, even quietly intimate in their intent. Perhaps this is due to her obvious winks, blinks and nods to children's and ethnographic art.”

About Mr. Griffith's painting he writes,  

“Feeshteek shows us a fish cut by the edge of the picture. It doesn't look like anything else.  Deener is simply a stylized table with a glass, knife and napkin. 

Only (his) Boosh – which, if his mock-accented titles run constant, must mean 'bush' – seems beyond literal interpretation. It's an odd painting, which is to say puzzling, which is to say sort of mysterious, which is to say there's something there worth looking at.”

But regarding Mannheimer's socio-anthropological angle, he concludes his review with a soliloquy about the plight of the starving artist versus the career of the comfy institutionalist, as pertaining generally to the uncertain economy and specifically to the two persons in the show,

“This (making art) is at best a tough, often painful business, fraught with disappointments, occasional disasters and always fickle fate. Not necessarily knowing where one's next bottle of beer is coming from can frazzle the most committed art-aholic.

It's best to appreciate those who manage whatever they can  in whatever their circumstances, and understand those who can't always manage as well or we might hope.”

Art is worth rooting for, and maybe supporting too, Mannheimer seems inspired by the exhibition to say.

Hot on the heels of the show, Patrick King's Passion Leads would quickly follow. And again both Marion Garmel in The News and Steve Mannheimer in The Star would provide thorough reviews.

In her April 20, Brush Strokes column, Garmel sets the scene,

“The paintings at Patrick King Contemporary Art literally scream off the walls: 'Me. Look at Me. This Is Me.”

Her review continues,

“This is Passion Leads, an exhibit of current Chicago painting by three artists...continuing through May 12 at the gallery...

In contrast to the impersonal images of the geometers and minimalists of the 1960s and '70s, Jim Brinsfield, Darinka Novitovic and Will Northerner want you to know these are their paintings reflecting their ideas, their insights, their emotions.

They trace their lineage to the first generation of truly American 20th century painters, the abstract expressionists of the 1940s and '50s, who also wanted to create a pictorial language that would express the physical and spiritual complexities of the modern world. As Brinsfield put it at the opening of the show,  'Being American, we have to be true to ourselves – and we have to be true to our ancestors.'

But unlike their ancestors, to whom the word 'abstract' was as important as the word 'expressionist,' these artists are working in a time when the figure is making a comeback. Their goal is to adopt the formal values of abstract expressionists to an art that incorporates the figure.”

This sounds like a serious undertaking and hearkens back to Patrick King's statement when still working at Editions Ltd., about his early days employed at the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City and even earlier exposure to galleries out East. He was attracted to serious, thought provoking artists, and the professional accommodation of the exhibition of their art.

Mannheimer would review the show as well in the April 29, Art World column,

“Passion Leads...sounds like the title of a Harlequin Romance. There's far more to it, but it's not an inappropriate analogy. Whatever their stylistic simplicities, these paintings, like those books, capture something basic of the American psyche.

As shows go, it's small – 11 decidedly neo-expressionist paintings by three Chicago artists...That's about all the gallery can accommodate. 

The show's impact, however, should be large.

...we have the first show of neo-expressionist painting in a local commercial gallery. Much more than the non-profit culture importers, commercial galleries take the temperature of a city's art scene. 

We're getting warmer. Whatever real art world sophistication is, we're getting closer to it.”

Both Garmel and Mannheimer refer to the exhibition catalog that accompanied the show, containing an essay written by art historian Joanna Muller Kuebler. The tagline to her overarching thesis is that the three Passion Leads artists make “art forms that transcend taste and style.”  Or perhaps to translate, this succinct Kuebler assertion, and Mannheimer's earlier analogy;  something like Beauty meets the Bold.

Mannheimer writes about the works,

“Jim Brinsfield...growls...power in Young Caesar and Loveland. The two paintings rely on energetic black-and-white brushstroke, some shades-of-subway spray paint and tumorous surfaces. Young Caesar is a scraggly, broken-limbed figure proclaiming a mixed stylistic heritage: Giacometti by way of graffiti.

Miss (Darinka) Novitovic's work, on the other hand, seems to have lept full-ardored from the brow of Venus. Her Language of Flowers (et al.)...are, in comparison to Brinsfield's, downright tender. 

In each piece, female figures are outlined in gentle brushstrokes against warmly colored backgrounds. They hug their knees, lift a hand to their face, whisper to each other, perhaps to themselves.

Northerner...has hold of a clutch of themes. His five paintings explore a spectrum of motifs and techniques that all, to some degree, bespeak religious metaphor.” 

Mannheimer describes Northerner's most compelling work, Solemn Maelstrom, Morass, Lianis Lift, 

“The simple, silver spray-painted figure emerging from a multi-colored maelstrom reminds one thematically of New Yorker Keith Haring's 'radiant child' emblem, a mythic creature of light dispelling modern gloom. Northerner's technique, however, is vastly more complex and engrossing.” 

Dividends of a Dream.

As can be seen from this survey of the critical coverage garnered by the exhibitions at Patrick King during his first year and a half of operation, he was riding high on street cred on the avenue. His gallery a force to be reckoned with by mid-1984. A pied piper or a kraken, sweet music or a roar? It's up to art's ear to decide. 

And as the beginning of the story has come to a close, it's time to thank Patrick King for being the first. 

And just think, if he had a nickel for every $100 being charged in rent along Massachusetts Avenue from 1982 up until today...

Well let's just say he could buy IMA or Newfields with that kind of money.  The building and the grounds, that is, not the art. The art inside, as Patrick knows, is priceless.

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 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.