The Art of Carla Knopp - Part Two

Moonchild, Carla Knopp, 1991

The Missing Myths of Texas, and a Return to Indiana.

In speaking with Carla Knopp at her east-side home and studio a few weeks ago in preparation for this blog, she explained that much of her work created during her time in Texas was sold hastily in a makeshift clearance sale in a store parking lot, somewhere between Texas and Indiana. She and a traveling companion had to make snap decisions and alternative arrangements after their vehicle broke down along the way.  There simply was not room to travel on with all they had packed.

We may better imagine Knopp's work from the Texas years in looking at an image that survived the trip, of a painting called Prophetic Axewoman, 1986.  The Texas piece shares a basic color scheme with a painting she will debut in Indianapolis a few years down the road, 6 AM Drug Test, 1990. 

Besides the similar colors, both paintings show a standing female protagonist at the center. Both also presents a curious dreamlike narrative that is difficult to decipher in the waking hours but might make perfect sense in the REM of midnight.

In the Axewoman picture, a ghostly woman stands, weapon heavy in one hand at her side, while she gives a thumbs up with the other. 

Prophetic Axewoman, Carla Knopp, 1986

She appears in a  clearing in a woods, the epicenter of a riddle of clues. A  mesmerizing spiral of a freshly sliced tree trunk, a large hole hollow hiding place in a tree, a group of four seductive nymphs caressing the skeletal trees behind. 

The forest maidens are are each a different color; one is flesh, the other three are the primary colors of all art –  red, yellow and blue.

And finally, at the deep edge behind, is some brighter place, beyond the treeline and the archaic grasp of the scene. The light halos a blue mist around the woman and alludes to an escape route at the wood's edge or the encroaching light of day to break the hold of the confusing fugue. 

The later Drug Test piece was in Carla Knopp's first exhibition upon her return to Indianapolis, the two-person show, Fine Lines, at  Denouement Fine Art on Mass Avenue in April 1990. It was a show that featured new paintings by Knopp and carved wood sculptures by Vaughn Becker.

'6 AM' could refer to the time of morning, or it could refer to a test for heroin in the system, known as a 6-AM (short for 6-acetomorphine) test. 

Regardless of the precise meaning, the image itself is as harrowing as a bloody hypodermic in your bowl of Cheerios. 

6 AM Drug Test, Carla Knopp, 1990

A naked standing woman (or seated looking up) is exposed, vulnerable as a specimen, in front of a white sheet draped between two poles flying the American flag. She's holding something in her hands, but it's not exactly clear. She's caught helpless, in a posture of composed surrender, between the power poles that pull not one way or the other –  not either, not or –  she's caught in the double bind of one in the same.  

All around, in purple and dark blue, is an orbit of frenzied birds on attack mode. The horror of the moment is palpable and the crazy birds, especially, remind of the crow calls in Van Gogh's final canvas, his last look at the fields that drove him mad. 

One can only imagine Knopp's 'lost' work from the Texas years in looking at these two images separated by a few years. 

What bewildering narratives were produced? What melding of real and surreal? What puzzling parables of Knopp's were sold at a roadside, tumbling somewhere between Austin and Indy, let go of cut-rate, like Elvis velvets or bargain day roses?  

Art at '80s End.  

Steve Mannheimer was perhaps the most entertaining and astute of the various chroniclers of mid-to-late-1980s Indianapolis art. His weekly column in The Indianapolis Star was both exhaustive and tireless in its coverage. One such article, important to this topic, appeared on February 26, 1989, and was headlined “A sharing of art but not a school.” 

It was a review of Ed Sanders then current show at 431 gallery, called Paintings from '88, but also concerned an interesting bunch of Indianapolis downtown artists, as a group. 

In the column, he remarks on several of the artists, as follows,

“A signal event for the group was Thomas Keesee's show at Patrick King Contemporary Art in 1985... (of) haunted, almost gnomic, neo-mythical images.

...Brian Fick paints a world shrinking into itself, the sun withdrawn below the horizon.

...Steve Paddack exhibited pictures of bridges collapsing under the weight of viscous paint and bare, dirty apartment walls holed by pools of black.  

(Ed) Sanders paints a shrouded world, drenched in night and ashes.”

And of Carla Knopp, Mannheimer writes,

“Before she moved to Texas, Carla Knopp painted tiny, unknowable incidents, illuminated by headlights.”

Applying pattern recognition to Mannheimer's observations, there certainly seems at least a thread of an aesthetic rope tying the artists together.

By a year later, Knopp is included with several of these artists in a show at the new Hindman Gallery of Contemporary Art located well north of downtown, more toward the money, in the Geist Reservoir area. 

It was an exhibit Steve Mannheimer considered a landmark, for various reasons, but primarily because it showcased a group of  artists he had been following closely for awhile by then, many his former students, who had been informing and challenging each other for the past several years in a series of shows, mainly at 431 Gallery. 

They had, by 1990,  self-organized under an umbrella title, the Indianapolis Artists Forum, although the primary impetus and driving factor behind the organization, was former 431 Gallery ringleader and fellow artist, Bill Adkins. 

Highlights from Mannheimer's column appearing in the May 20, 1990, Indianapolis Star, are as follows,

“A couple of months ago, I saw an exhibition of paintings by Brian Fick at the 431 Gallery. A couple of his paintings reminded me uncannily of paintings done by Bill Adkins several years ago...One work also reminded me of a 5-or-6-year-old work by Carla Knopp.

The show got me thinking of other artists, of Ed Sanders, Steve Paddack, Jesse Speight, Tom Keesee, Terry Copen and others. They should be seen together, I thought. Their artistic voice is really collective, a chorus.”

Rocks and Flowers, Brian Fick

Later in the review of specific pieces in the show, Mannheimer points out further connections he sees,

“A meteor hits the center of Paddack's Poet with enough force to break your nose, the same force gnarled up in the tormented, engorged, angel overflying an earth ripe for penetration in Sanders' Oil on Canvas.

In Rocks and Flowers, Fick paints boulders with Sanders' lush brush, but in Tree Stump Painting, with its overall stump glazed wet and clear as a pool of water, he edges toward the mixed metaphor which Knopp prefers in Earth Jug, an apparition of a handled vase, an empty receptacle rising like a mountain, like a skyscraper.  (Holly) Jackson likewise mixes her metaphors, turning falling leaves into Union Jewels.

When Larry Kline paints a desk-chair as a forest and waterfall, he realigns nature as artifact, deliberately confusing the form and boundary of his image . The same strategy Fick employs in his overbuilt frames.

The analogies go on and on...”   

Mannheimer sums up his thoughts on the group of artists and the exhibition, and of their shared training at Herron, including time as students in his own classes, 

“These artists have gone far beyond any tutelage. They now take their cues from each other and from the world they inhabit, inspect and recreate with a vision that is completely and uniquely theirs  and the city's. It's now up to the city to see it and embrace it.” 

We see Mannheimer's comments about Knopp's art as being illuminative, unknowable and metaphorical. Apt words to describe Knopp's mythological mysteriousness, the koan at the crux of her works, which portray the great doubts encountered along the existential way, life's road of maybe this or maybe that.

Another art writer at the time, Sharon Calhoun in Arts Indiana magazine (September 1990),  reviewed the same show. She argues for a broader Herron aesthetic among not only the Indianapolis Artists Forum artists but their Herron instructors as well. She notes influences of certain faculty in their students, as follows,

“If you look, and not that hard, hints of Herron faculty can be seen in this exhibit: Robert Berkshire's abstract expressionism in the work of Ed Sanders; Robert Eagerton's bent for the naturalist's expression  in Brian Fick's canvases; Peg Fierke's repetitive elliptical shapes reflected by Carla Knopp; Steve Mannheimer's constant push over the edge in the thick black voids of Steve Paddack's paintings...” 

Although Calhoun questioned the emergence of any apparent Indianapolis school in the exhibit, she did  approve of the efforts overall, summing up her remarks,

“Group exhibits are rarely as solid as this one. Whether it is like environment, like education, or like minds that bind these artists, the results should be applauded and supported.”

Later that year in September 1990,  Knopp was included in another group show at Hindman Gallery, along with Holly Jackson, Teresa Sciscoe Madden, Ellie Siskind, Stephen Stoller and Penny Viantis.

Geist or Not...

As it would turn out, Carla Knopp's planned solo exhibit for the Hindman Gallery set to open May 10, 1991, was not to be. Called Human Bytes in an advertisement appearing in Arts Indiana May 1991, her work was already prepared and ready to hang, but the gallery ceased operations at the moment when she was the artist on-deck. 

Flashjoy, Carla Knopp, 1991

Steve Mannheimer in The Star and Marion Garmel, in The News, both fans of the gallery, outlined the reasons for the sudden cessation of Hindman Gallery, as a combination of a second opinion, second thoughts, or cold feet. (The articles appeared in April and September 1991.)  The bottom line was that the owner, Marge Hindman, returned her concentration to the frame shop operations that preceded her progressive gallery interlude.

In speaking with Knopp, she acknowledged her disappointment when the gallery closed when she was next up. She had been working as a waitress, applying whatever extroversion she could muster at the  job, as required. If there was a silver lining, to an inwards leaning artists being thrust into the populated milieu of a restaurant setting, it was the daily cast a characters who were to influence her next body of work.  The series of portraits that would have been shown at Hindman's.

Vic, Carla Knopp, 1991

Knopp began painting faces of customers she recalled from waiting tables. As she worked on each painting, she noticed that the memory image was transformed into a likeness of a person in her close circle of friends. 

In thinking about her description of the process, it seems a metamorphosis, though not like Kafka's. Perhaps a process of prophesy more apparent and down-to-earth than her own axewoman's. A budding awareness of the reality of change. A modest epiphany like a fortune cookie message saying 'lemonade from lemons' or 'roll with the punches.'

The downtown artists scene will transform again and again, throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, with the successive births of In Vivo Gallery, 4 Star Gallery and Harrison Center. 

Carla Knopp will be there for the entire transmutation, changing and creating, as we shall see in Part Three. 

Mark Diekhoff, April 2026

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

The Art of Carla Knopp - Part One

 Girl Like You, Carla Knopp, 1983

An Artist Like Her.

The first public notice of an exhibition by Indianapolis-based artist Carla Knopp occurred in the Spring of 1984, while she was still a student at the Herron School of Art. 

The show was part of a number of temporary installations and exhibits mounted by Herron students in and around the school and its near north-side vicinity of downtown Indianapolis.

According to an April 27, 1984, column by Marion Garmel in The Indianapolis News, the event was called Herron Goes Public, and would coincide with the biennial Painting and Sculpture Today show at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). 

Recall that the IMA show was an ambitious, recurring exhibition arranged by the museum and its Contemporary Arts Society that was a showcase of the latest thing in art, selected from contemporary galleries in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.  

Some noteworthy trends on the national stage that year, 1984, according to Garmel's article, were graffiti-inspired art, new figuration and mythological themes.  

Carla Knopp had created artworks that predated the show, prior to her graduation from Herron, and the ambiguous fascination of the young artist's vision began making its appearance in her paintings, it seems, from the start. 

Take for example, A Girl Like You, 1983 (top of page). In that picture, at first glance, a full-length depiction of a bride and groom dancing at a wedding. The man in black tuxedo and the woman in white dress and veil. But the sketchiness in the way it is painted, and the gesture of the figures invites more haphazard interpretations. Such as the dance more controlling than consensual. The woman looks to be tripping over the man's outstretched leg and into the grasp of his song.   

About  a year, then, after that painting, amid the flurry of excitement surrounding the national art show at the IMA, was Carla Knopp's first exhibition.  

She, along with numerous other Herron students, presented art in a variety of locations, including Herron itself, and others such as The Children's Museum, the Indiana Repertory Theater, and Morrison Opera Place.

Carla Knopp's contribution was described as “miniature civilizations set up in a debris ridden house” at 1615 N. Talbott Street, right across from the art school, according to Garmel's column. It is a succinct and alluring description.

In speaking with the artist in her east-side home a few weeks ago, she was not able to recall the student show, or her installation, with specificity after all the passing years. No photographs or other documentation survives, just Marion Garmel's brief mention cited above.

Another work Knopp created around this time, and opposite in concept to mini, was her monumental painting Olga's World, 1983. 

The massive horizontal work, 10 feet wide and 4 feet tall, depicted perhaps her homage to Andrew Wyeth's painting of a similar name and theme, Christina's World, 1948.  

Olga's World, Carla Knopp, 1983

Both works show a girl, an expansive field, and a distant house on a stark horizon.  But Knopp's cinematic composition shows the protagonist, Olga, with a huge rounded head and shoulders that dominate the right side of the painting with a strange leering majesty. The rear-view  portrait bust is mountain-like in the way it imposes upon the landscape.  Olga's soft, though massive, feminine lines are echoed in the curving road to the house in the distance. 

The viewer's bizarre angle on Olga, from almost totally behind, and her round head, her strange, minimal hairstyle – all serve to create a layered intrigue that defies the overtly rudimentary, comic book simplicity of the image.  

Just a month later in June 1984, the same News writer, Marion Garmel, in her weekly Brush Strokes column, would cover Knopp's participation in a three-person show.  It was the first of a summer series of shows at Lyman & Snodgrass Gallery downtown at 1456 North Delaware Street. Knopp exhibited with fellow artists Becky Wilson and Kris Lemmon.

Garmel described an overall “primitive neo-expressionism...” shared among all three artists. 

She writes of  Lemmon's work as “great whirlpools of paint”  populated with “blank-faced people.”  And Wilson's work, Garmel describes, as pictures of tribesmen “doing things in their socks.”

It wasn't a painterly style or exotic subject matter that attracted Garmel to the paintings of Carla Knopp in that show. Rather, it was the wit captured in the small, varnished paintings. 

Knopp's comedic sense is described variously in the article over and over – first in its headline as “an acrid sense of humor,” then its first line as “a wicked sense of humor,” and later in the review as Knopp's paintings' portrayal of the world “as one big joke.” 

The writer's article is noteworthy in its being the first substantive review of Knopp's work in the Indianapolis press and also in its reporting that the three artists in the show were also to be founding members of a new alternative space gallery to open that fall on Massachusetts Avenue in Indianapolis –  431 Gallery.

In the review, Garmel elaborates on what tickled at her funny bone in Knopp's art,

"(Knopp's sense of humor is) most evident in her 'meany' series – Meany #1, Meany #2 and Meany #3 – in which 'meanies' pop out of the brush to spy on lovers in a car or fell a tree that falls across a river just as a canoe is coming round the bend.

Even more fun – and a bit more eerie – is her butler series, in which the black-suited figure  of the butler, sometimes with a white serving cloth draped over his arm, cuts off the views of people swimming, a girl sitting in a garden and so forth.

It is difficult to tell whether these people the butler seems to be watching are in trouble or whether they are shouting orders to him. But the effect, both in the painting and the subject, is wonderfully surreal.”  

Not covered by Garmel's article, but related, is the work Bad Boy Good Boy, 1984,  a diptych whose two paintings show a boy each, up to something. 

It might be easier to spot the bad seed in looking at both pictures. The foul lad, presumably, holds a torch in the foreground, while a fire rages out of control behind him. Whereas the good boy is less decisively so, holding his pail of uncertain merit, while something mysterious, and yes eerie, billows like a tree-shaped, mushroom cloud of steam behind. 

Bad Boy Good Boy diptych, Carla Knopp, 1984

The Knopp style of representation here is childlike in a naivety that works well with the purported cautionary tale of her titles. Her use of color, too, is simple and symbolic –  red and black for the nasty fire boy and gray and white for the goody two shoes.    

The Lyman Snodgrass summer series of four shows would feature the art of many current and recently graduated Herron students as Steve Mannheimer described in a July 8, 1984, Indianapolis Star column. 

Mannheimer reports on gallery owner, James Snodgrass, a former Herron student himself, and his commitment to showing local artists.  A commitment, particularly with the summer series, to showing the city's young talent.  

Mannheimer also noted that many of the artists exhibited in the  series would also be associated with the forthcoming 431 Gallery.

Along those lines, the following fall, Mannheimer would review 431's first show on November 18, 1984, in his column in The Star.  About 431 generally, Mannheimer introduces the gallery and writes broadly about the artwork and ambiance of the first exhibition,

“...431 Gallery (is) the latest addition to the city's gallery scene. Named for its address, the gallery is a non-profit, cooperative venture for 12 local member artists.

All in all, the imagery is progressive, the energy is infectious and the urge is to smile quite broadly. One can't help but feel optimistic.”

And his first beguiling words about the work of Carla Knopp, and her offbeat sense of irony and humor, are also contained in the review,

“The show has a lot to recommend...Carla Knopp's two paintings of rather domestic dinosaurs, So As Not To Be Afraid and So As Not To Be Overpowered, are eerie litanies against instinct.”  

 from the Fear of Tyrannosaur series, Carla Knopp, 1984

It is noted that both Garmel and Mannheimer describe a playful dissonance, they label as eerie, in Knopp's earliest paintings. The word eerie can have a meaning across a spectrum of similar words from creepy and spooky to uncanny or unearthly, or just plain weird. 

It's a you know it when you see it type of thing.

As Carla Knopp unveils additional work of evolving themes and subjects over the following years, her brand of eerie will become better known to the Indianapolis art scene.  Her venues will venture out and about like her art and will read like a Who's Who compendium of art gallery and spaces in the latter 20th Century in our city.  

But first, she will leave Indiana, at a time that seemed just on the verge of the Mass Ave explosion. Carla Knopp would relocate to Texas for roughly five years. 

When I spoke to her recently about the unnamed art movement that seemed to be forming in Indianapolis around 431 Gallery, Patrick King and Mass Ave at the time of her departure, she balked and begged to differ about any fuss along those lines. Knopp adamantly dismissed any idea an Indianapolis school  or a label for the various downtown artists in the mid '80s. To name a group of some or a few, by definition, excludes others, and is an exercise she staunchly rejects. 

As we shall see in Part Two, which picks up when Knopp returns to Indianapolis in the late '80s, the artist will continue to explore her brand of the otherworldly with new visions of the uncanny. Her pictures will be debris-ridden, at times, gorgeously glittering, at others. Mundane, sublime or epic, her miniature civilizations to come will span epochs and emotions with timeless frenzy, frozen dread, and  many other things. 

Self-Confessed, Carla Knopp, 1984

Mark Diekhoff, April 2026

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

Understories by Meg Lagodzki at Harrison Center

Storm Damage #30, Meg Lagodzki

The Green, Green, Green of Home.

Continuing through March in the main Harrison Gallery of Harrison Center, is Meg Lagodzki's interesting two-fold exhibition depicting the marvelous orderly chaos and awesome intrinsic beauty of nature, Understories.

The show consists of an ambitious primary body of work, created from acrylic paint on collage paper, which seems a botanist's survey of a variety of trees, bushes and particularly wildflowers seen on a hike in a woods.  

Each picture, a jam-packed, organic macrocosm. Each a daunting, visual  jigsaw puzzle.  A quilting together of a myriad of woodland species, jostling amid the shade, overlapping each other for the sun. A cacophony of plants species dynamically enmeshed and intertwined. 

The second distinct group of works – an ancillary series of about 30 small oil paintings – neatly arranged along a wall of the gallery. In contrast to the collage works,  they appear more empty, more abstract. They are almost minimal in comparison to the wildly busy forest pieces.  

Each picture,  arranged in a symmetric long row, shows a young tree, presumably broken by strong straight-line winds.  Each slender trunk destroyed and fractured. Painted images that are at once awful and transfixing, and executed with a deft touch of jagged perfection.

Understories, as a  group, shows an artist's reverence for a forest at a human scale, to a nature undersky and at times underfoot, at ground level, where the wood meets the dirt.  

Seen up close, in the painted collages, you see the method of Lagodzki's magic. At a distance, you are lost in her exuberant forest. She achieves an exotic yet familiar arm's length landscape vision, as innocent as a childhood drawing, and as bountifully fertile as Mother Nature herself.   

Earth-tones, only, in Lagodzki's Gaia of mainly green. 

The piece Northwoods, Banshee, a large acrylic and collage, is a tour de force of a composition. A white willow's tendrils flow sideways across the picture, screaming in the wind. A close inspection of the painted paper show the care of Lagodzki's technique in imbuing all the different textures on the surface of her many papers with the paint. She achieves an overall richness through these various marks. Her hatching, spotting and slight variations in the layers of her color tones, create a tactile sensation on the eyes of the viewer.

Northwoods, September by Meg Lagodzki

Northwoods, September, in the same series and at the same scale, is more colorful, with blue sky peeking at the top, and gold and copper ferns and fronds at the foreground. 

The gray and skeletal dead limbs of a tangled pine forest inhabit the picture's center with a porcupine army of quills, working their way up the trunks.   

Bluebells, Meg Lagodzki

Some smaller collage works serve as a homage to individual flora species such as in Jewelweed, Gladeferns #2,  Bluebells and Pokeweed, and are touchingly observant in their execution. 

Fallen Trees, Collateral Damage.

The linear presentation of the smallish oil on canvas works, Storm Damage (# 1 through 30), (top and bottom of page) creates an impression of somber edification, not unlike the military section of cemeteries and their solemn marked rows of the fallen. 

Young trees, mainly, snapped much too soon, are the remembered heroes of Logodzki's tribute. 

We see what they shared, these victimized trees. The splintering trauma of an almighty power.  And we see them portrayed as the individual miracle machines of growth that they were, that all trees are, and all seeds have the potential to become, if only for a little while.

Storm Damage (various #'s 1 - 30) , detail of installation, Meg Lagodzki

Mark Diekhoff, March 2026 

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

Forgotten Graces by Kevin West at Harrison Center

City Boys, Kevin West

Just ended in the large central gallery of Harrison Center, was a dynamic display of Kevin West's portraits and figurative works. In the artist's words accompanying the exhibit, he explained the overall theme of the show, 

 “(Forgotten Graces) is a reflection on the quiet, uncelebrated  gifts that shaped my childhood – moments so gentle and ordinary that I did not recognize their significance until I was grown.”

The works, numbering about fifteen, mostly oil on canvas and many quite large, are evidence that the graces were not forgotten forever. The pictures are packed with personality and story – memories of a youth populated by an engaging cast of characters.  People, mainly children, but not always, that seem relaxed, guard down –  like family and close friends –  who allow West the privilege of the close proximity of their eyes and essence. 

West's compositions have a sculptural presence – as monumental snapshot  or epic tableau. Several styles seem apparent among the works, though without date on the title cars, the variation among the pictures may represent either recurring styles or an evolution from one to the other.

Grannies Rocking Chair, Kevin West

City Boys, (top of page) is one such style, also seen in Grannies Rocking Chair. A looseness pervades the execution of these pictures. 

In City Boys,  the trousers are drawn in with a few strokes of the paintbrush, and an archetypal city skyline is sketched overhead. The individual portrait faces of the four youngsters possess the most detail and, like most of West's paintings, is the focus that beckons most. 

More narrative in design are the paintings such as Proverbs 22, 6 and Matthew 4, 19 Fishers of Men.

In the Proverbs piece, a grandfather attentively buttons the shirt of a grandson in what must be a routine and recurring morning ritual. They look across a distance of mere inches, not quite at each other. The grandfather is weary but devoted, while the grandson seems compliant yet preoccupied, perhaps already anticipating his school day.  They are in a room with a dresser and a little still life of Murray Pomade in an orange tin and a black comb.

Proverbs 22, 6, Kevin West

In the Matthew, Fishers picture, a group of four boys and a young man, stand surefooted on a small fishing boat, their city a sunlit sea, a ways offshore. Complimentary hues of orange and aqua on the boat, the bow pointing upwards in the picture, as the does the overall pyramidal grouping of the fishermen. The water must be full of fish, they must be thinking, looking out upon the vast water.

Another style is seen in a few large paintings, almost pop art in the brevity and punch of their imagery.  The backgrounds lack any identifiable place, just a line of horizon between two color fields. In these,the minimization of space serves to maximize the presence and attitude of the subject. One such of this style is The long way home. The painting shows an innovative pose of a close up of a girl atop her bicycle. Her arms are crossed, forming a V shape, that projects like the unseen front tire toward the viewer. It's a relaxed and casual leaning onto the shining handlebars. But the wedge of her elbows together gives the impression that nothing in front of her can stop her.

She wears an almost impossibly large white hat, that she tilts in a way that hints at a nonchalant confidence. If the way home is indeed long, and maybe even windy, there is no doubt she will simply tip her head down, and peddle forward, and she and her hat will make it, no problem. 

Matthew 4, 19 Fishers of Men (left) and The long way home (right), Kevin West
in detail of installation at Harrison Center in February

Mark Diekhoff, March 2026

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

India Cruse-Griffin – Exhibits in Richmond and Indianapolis

Keys for My Son, India Cruse-Griffin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Methods and Motivations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To See Her is to Know Her.

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

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

Winters Symphony, India Cruse-Griffin

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

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

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

Street Life, India Cruse-Griffin

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

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

India Cruse-Griffin works at Richmond Art Museum

Love is Blue.

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

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

Prayers under one roof, India Cruse-Griffin

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

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

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

Sunday and the Piano, India Cruse-Griffin

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

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

Mark Diekhoff, March 2026

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

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

Fiberglass Plant Smokestacks III, Joseph T. Swanson

Art All Over Richmond.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prehistoric Cataract 6, Joseph T. Swanson

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

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

Venetian Red Neapolitan Green, Joseph T. Swanson

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

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

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

His exhibition at Reid Health continues through April.

Mark Diekhoff, February 2026

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.