Peg Fierke Art – Part Three

Module/Mass (detail), 1984, etching on paper, Peg Fierke

Troy Wasn't Built in a Day

Maybe there is likely a natural evolution of a creative spirit, a maturation, that arrives around the time of mid-career. When the first experiments are over but their lessons have been learned. By which time accolades and innovation are accepted as a part of the process as opposed to means to an end.    

As the 1970s were ending, with the next decade on the horizon, the art of Peg Fierke would begin a transition away from a vantage point of a surreal observation, an almost clinical depiction of the quirks and qualms of life, toward a viewpoint less apart and looking, and more at one with and being. 

Ideas of cross-hatching and the many steps of a marathon, and of personal life, would come more to the forefront of her thinking and appear in her artworks. 

Fierke's first inklings of this change are noted by writer Marion Garmel in her review of Fierke's new work exhibited at a 2-person show, along with Robert Eagerton, at Herron Gallery in 1977. 

In her November 9, Indianapolis News column, the writer observes,

 “Miss Fierke('s)...etchings, colored-pencil and ink drawings, and one large oil are filled with organic, vegetable-like forms in surreal juxtaposition.”

Garmel is describing in this line just a portion of Fierke's works in the show, works that emphasize earlier directions. The writer also notes a new direction for Fierke, in many other pieces,

“Most recently, the artist has moved into color(,) and a kind of wispy, coloring book style dominates her drawings. There is little of the old geometry from which she once constructed three-dimensional environments based on her drawings, but there is a great sense of motion in these new works.”   

Over the following couple of years, Fierke would be involved in numerous activities, both art and otherwise, as noted in the local newspapers. 

In 1978 , she would participate in a Herron Gallery theme show called Chairs. 

Cursory newspaper coverage of the event advised readers that the show of artworks was by Herron students and faculty. The only artist mentioned by name in a February 25 blurb was Fierke, about whom was written “...some marvelous prints by Peg Fierke in which chairs float in space, straddle each other and serve as hanging lines for underwear and seats for grass.”

Related to her life outside of art, Fierke was a volunteer and member in various outings for the Central Indiana Bicycling Association around that time.

Fierke would participate in Roadshow '79 the following year, in what is described in the Indianapolis Star, on July 15,  as an exhibit “of works on 40 billboards throughout Marion County sponsored by the Indianapolis Art League.”   

That same summer, Fierke would be in the group show of local, national and international artists at  Indianapolis Museum of Art, called Contemporary Prints and Drawings by Contemporary Women. The other local women also included were Samia Halaby, who studied at Indiana University at Bloomington, and Martha Slaymaker, a former Indianapolis resident then living in Albuquerque, NM. The more widely-known participants included Alice Neel and Helen Frankenthaler.

Fierke would cap off the '70s, and perhaps an era of her earlier style, with two important shows in the 1980;  a smelly opus of a surreal swan song first, and then the show at the dawn of her new and percussive age of many marks.  

Starting with the first show, in February of 1980, as part of the annual Herron faculty exhibit, Fierke presented her installation/sculpture, Waitin' On Summer.  

I have already covered this artwork, and Marion Garmel's impressions of this thoroughly post-modern Fierke in the prior piece about Steve Mannheimer here.  

But for purposes of understanding this period in Fierke's career, and her art influences at the time, a second look at Garmel's column is helpful.  It quotes Fierke, in her own words,

“Sometimes art seems irrelevant to the rest of your life. I was thinking of the recent Joseph Beuys exhibit in New York. It was so strong because his life is so much a part of his art. It seems important to make other things important to me part of my art.”  

Garmel further writes, explaining,

“Miss Fierke is an avid gardener and various parts of Waitin' On Summer had hung in her backyard since they were first exhibited, in an entirely different manner, at Editions Ltd. Gallery. The seed box, for example once hung from the ceiling and had giant seed pods attached to it. Later it sat in a dead tree in Miss Fierke's backyard, as pictured in a photograph that accompanies the piece.” 

Garmel again quotes the artist,

“It has deteriorated greatly since and that is part of the idea of the piece. The generative notion, of life and growing organic matter. Time goes on. Things change.”

By that November, in a show of pen and ink drawings, it seems Fierke's time had come for things to change.  Marion Garmel, always aware of Fierke's exhibitions and vigilant in covering her career arc, devoted a column of Brush Strokes to the show. 

Held at the Jewish Community Center in Indianapolis, the exhibition was reviewed in the November 1, 1980, Indianapolis News.  The column opens with the line, “No one can accuse Margaret “Peg” Fierke of standing still.”

Garmel goes on describe Fierke's award winning days, reputation and past work, from Grass in 1972 to the most recent Waitin' On Summer, from earlier that year. Garmel then describes a change,

“Now Miss Fierke has taken a new turn. Peg Fierke: Recent Works...is an intriguing show of pen and ink drawings and paintings in which surrealist space and displacement of objects  no longer plays any part.

Indeed, the drawings and paintings all seem to tell little stories in images derived from the artist's current concerns – jogging, bicycling and gardening. More interesting yet, perspective and attempts to create illusion of three-dimensional space have disappeared. All the works are surface pieces, done with a cover of cross-hatched lines that make the images appear to pop out and recede from behind a theatrical scrim.”

Garmel then quotes Fierke directly, from remarks the artist gave at the show's opening,

“In school you are always taught the most contemporary ways of printmaking...But I would go up to the Art Institute (in Chicago) and look at the old prints and love the things the old artists did, the crosshatching, the patterns formed. By manipulating the direction of the stroke you could bring out different things. It's a nice way to get transparencies.

Then I found I could get the same effects of obscuring and transparency with color.”   

Garmel continues her own observations, in response to Fierke's comments about technique, 

“(Fierke) has always been more a technician than a storyteller. Yet the works in this show are almost little autobiographies. It is easy to see what the artist's life is like. She's a dog owner, likes farms and farm animals, runs, bicycles and loves to garden. 

There is a even marriage between life and art in the way these new works are constructed.” 

And along those lines, she quotes Fierke again,

“I think the meticulous mark-making is a lot like running a marathon. The careful buildup, the training – one step at a time, one day at a time. When you run a marathon you don't run 26 miles at once, you run one step at a time.”

In December, some of the same works were shown at Herron and reviewed by Elizabeth Willis-Sowards in Arts Insight magazine. Willis-Sowards also describes the autobiographical nature of many of Fierke's latest images, such as of “the artist's dog, Otto, and wooden protective structures from her garden.”

She further describes the effects of Fierke's new techniques,

“Space and perspective are...multifaceted and complex in Fierke's works. Subtle layers of transparent space , as found in The Wrench or the Troy Bilt painting, juxtapose in the exhibit with drawings like Otto's House which seems to have countless vanishing points, yet remains cohesive.”     

Mid-career Milestone.

The 1980s would bring recurring Herron faculty exhibits every couple of years to showcase Peg Fierke's developing mark making. 

In 1981, her Line of Scrimmage series, a suite of pieces, is described by Garmel in The News as

“a line of hair-width pencil marks snakes like an S, circles like an O and divides like a zipper in 15 panels.” 

Following the progression, in an October 14, 1983, review of the then current Herron faculty show, Garmel describes Fierke's work that year,

“Peg Fierke, who in the past has gone from crisp, linear surrealistic graphics to found-object sculptures, has changed again. Here she is showing heavily painted canvases where each dense stroke is like a feather on a bird.”

By 1985, Peg Fierke will be showing at the new 431 Gallery on Massachusetts Avenue, and it will be a new writer that will review her show. Marcus Chandler, writing in The Indianapolis Star  on March 17, 1985, in a column headlined, Peg Fierke's repetitive patterns are hypnotic, begins the review, in part as follows,

“Peg Fierke is a paragon of compulsion. In her paintings, drawings and prints exhibited at the 431 Gallery...she ceaselessly repeats a single small form. 

With the exception of just two drawings, all of her works are completely covered with elongated ellipses, each approximately the size and the shape of a guppy, each dotted with a dollop of color.

Schools of ellipses are arranged in some of the works as swirling abstract images and in others as recognizable shapes.”  

(An etching on paper from this period, Module/Mass is on current display in the Peg Fierke retrospective exhibit in the Herron Galleries, Evidence of Things Unseen. The show also contains the engraved copper plate used to create that print - see image at top of page)

The writer discusses what he considers the particularly strong works in the show,

“The best paintings in Ms. Fierke's exhibit have a similar hypnotic power, such as On A Roll wherein the gentle flow of countless ellipses creates flower like images. The artist elegantly employs the essential ingredient of hypnosis: repeated suggestion.”

 

Marion Garmel would cover the same show in The Indianapolis News. In her column headlined A kaleidoscope of art appearing March 8, 1985, she writes,

“You might not think much could be made of a thin leaf shape in varying colors but Peg Fierke, in her recent paintings at the 431 Gallery ...would prove you wrong.

Miss Fierke...has been through a number of stags in her career, from the deftly surreal drawings that won her acclaim in the early 1970s to the organic “growing” constructions that she displayed in Herron faculty shows two years ago. 

Now she has turned to painting and a virtuoso turn it is. Seventeen works, mostly paintings, are in her one woman show, all based on the same idea: an oval leaf form repeated hundreds of times across a canvas, sometimes with thick outlines, sometimes with paint-daubed bodies and sometimes with little eyes so that they look like swarms of fish.”

In the thoroughly descriptive and informative column, the writer discusses the chronology of the works, the gallery layout, and a few paintings in particular,

“...Fish Eyes, with its pink eyes in purple fish, looks like fish eyes before you read the tile. On A Roll, which sold at the opening for $1500, has a sunburst effect, in oranges and greens, like a hundred bird feathers proudly spread...

...by far the best is Constancy of Change, selling for $2000 and worth every penny of it. Here the  leaf shapes are outlined in thick yellow with some white space in between, and, as the leaves touch and don't touch across the canvas, a wonderful organic pattern appears. It gives you the feeling of floating in space.”

That fall, Garmel would cover the Herron Faculty Biennial Exhibition in her News column on October 25, 1985. Fresh off her 431 Show, Fierke continues to deliver beautiful artwork, as the writer describes,

“Peg Fierke's The Blood of Others, in her current style of overall painting, is a large canvus full of eyes in which, at strategic points, the paint drips down like tears. It is one of the finest things she has ever done.” 

If Fierke had been peddling her bike toward the top of a hill, perhaps she'd reached some sort of summit by that point. Or if peddling in the desert, some sort oasis or fountain had been found. One thing is clear, she had not strayed far or often, if ever at all, from her road of discovery.

A marathon route, although perhaps preset and known at the outset, is challenging by way of duration, through its pounding pavement.  It presents its own kind of mystery –  Will I make it? –  in every one of its thousands of strides. 

A bicycle ride on an Indiana country road presents adventure at every 90 degree turn. Sometimes the tidy scheme and utility of a farm layout with its fields and buildings, sometimes the shimmering oceans of leaves of growing corn in the wind. If not summer, the winter trees, and the bifurcation of naked branches, like river deltas reaching in the sky. 

In Fierke's work the 431 Gallery Show in 1985, we see a mid-career change of route. A new path underfoot, fresh gravel for the bicycle wheels. Something new is growing in the garden, and we shall see something new in the rhythmic strata of Fierke's work to come, something of a wood-grain flow will come to fruition in Part Four. 

Photo of Peg Fierke in 1982, Indianapolis News

Mark Diekhoff, July 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.

Peg Fierke Art – Part Two

Print (no title given), Peg Fierke,
from Herron Faculty 12, Part II, 1972 (the basis for Straddle Chair?)

 

Artistic Space-Out Statements.

In the early 1970s, after her success with the mixed media etching Three Sided Gravity, Peg Fierke went all-in on the illusionary space with her next major break-out work, the ink on paper, color lithograph, Grass. 

Her space here, though, and her illusions, in comparison to the earlier work, seem pumped up on steroids. She's turned up the color, from monotone mainly, to a complimentary clash of orange and green. She's upped the architectural surrealism from the paradox of an Escher staircase to an outright Soylent Green. She amped up the comic elements from Archie to Weird Tales. 

She's drawn a two-tiered organic processing factory of vats and tanks.  Both growing crops, and harvested plant matter, it seems, are processed. 

The scene is peopled by either; 1) the resulting manufactured impossibles created by the sleek, white, modular machines, or 2) the alien supervisors attending the lines.

Whatever they are – these wigs on stands or hanging hippie lamp personages – these stuffed toys and perfume bottles – this gathering a dinette chairs –these are strange things that perplex. 

Grass is a large piece, about 22” x 30”, and was first exhibited in the Indianapolis Museum of Art exhibit, Works on Paper 72. 

A preview detailing the exhibit appeared in The Week In Indiana Art column of The Indianapolis Star, January 9, 1972,

“Works on Paper, a biennial exhibition which alternates with the Indiana Artists Exhibition, will open at ...(IMA)...in the third floor North Gallery.

A total of 775 drawings, prints watercolors, as well as various other works of mixed media on paper, were submitted...

There are 88 works in the show. ”

Days later, on January 12, The Star reports that Grass has been awarded the $500 best work award of all submissions. 

The same day, in The Indianapolis News, in her Brush Strokes column, Marion Garmel reviews the show. 

About Grass, she writes,

“There also seems, from this exhibit, to be a new interest in the surrealistic kind of art that Salvador Dali so loved. The influence is most apparent in some of the prize winners. Margaret D. Fierke's first-prize lithograph Grass, for example. It won the Indianapolis artist the...W. D. Peat purchase prize. In it a lush lawn grows atop what looks to be an architect's model for a square building. In the basement corn is growing, while limp Swiss cheese droops over pipes to one side, a gorilla hangs in the window  of an adjoining structure, and some chairs stand quietly off on another side.”

A month later in February, Grass would begin making the rounds, as an encore to the IMA performance; a first stop at Fierke's Indianapolis gallery, Editions Ltd. 

(As a purchase award winning work, Grass is currently in the Newfields collection, and an image of the work can be seen here.)

Fierke, who began exhibited under the name M. D. Fierke around this time, would create another big bang later that year with her submission to the Herron faculty show. 

Marion Garmel would cover the show, Herron Faculty 12, Part II, in her December 6, 1972, News column, which begins with Fierke,

“The initials in M. D. Fierke's name stand for Margaret Diane, but everyone calls her Peg.

Blonde, ebullient and not yet 30, she is a printmaker and assistant professor of printmaking at the Herron School of Art who already is something of a legend in Indianapolis art circles.

She doesn't produce much art, but what she does produce wins every prize in sight.”

Garmel goes on to describe Fierke's main submission to the show, and in doing so, introduces the reader to yet another expansion of Fierke's reservoir of art forms. 

Untitled (detail), Peg Fierke, appears mixed media 
(This work may be related in theme and style to the work Grass.
It was included in Evidence of Things Unseen
at Herron Galleries, 2026.)

Recall  that we have already seen Fierke's drawing and painting. We have seen printmaking works of a wide variety and mix of media types. We have seen assemblage-type constructions as early as 1969. 

Garmel explains Fierke's latest development in great detail, and will be quoted in large part here as a photograph of the work in question has not been located in any press coverage from that time, 

“Printmaker Fierke...has done something unusual for this show. Normally a strictly two-dimensional artist interested in the manipulation of ordinary and imaginary objects in space, she has decided to reproduce one of her surrealist-like prints in three dimensions. The “installation,” as she calls it, is all black and white with chairs stacked one on the other and limp objects hang about. It took three weeks to construct and looks remarkable like the print on which it is based, which took her two years to complete. Both are excellent.” 

The article does contain an image of the print that served as launching point for the installation (image at top of page).

Also in The Indianapolis News, on December 15, in his self-titled column, Henry Butler, the local interest writer covered the Herron faculty show, with an emphasis on Fierke's submissions. 

Known for his coverage capturing the cultural and architectural pulse of Indianapolis at that time, Butler takes a stab at understanding Fierke, an in doing so, names the work's title in the first words of his article,

“Straddle Chair, apparently the 3-D original of a two-foot-square intaglio by printmaker M. D. Fierke, takes the mind-boggling prize in part 2 of the Herron Art School faculty Exhibition.

This chicken-coop-sized structure of props, vistas, tromp-l'oiel effects combines the absurd and the clinical.

It contains hints of the old nursery chaise percee, along with multifingered gloves and similar disturbing accessories. Is it just for fun?” 

(Chaise percee is apparently a froofy word for 'potty chair.' You can join Peg in laughing, just for fun.)

Head Shrugging, Right?

It is difficult to know the exact direction of Peg Fierke's artwork over the next few years. She continues to exhibit at her gallery in town, Editions Ltd., and in shows elsewhere in Indiana and out-of-state. 

She continues to exhibit in the Herron faculty annuals, but detailed reviews of her work are scarce in this period. Photograph are hard to come by, as well.  

And even in the retrospective exhibit at Herron Galleries now on display, Evidence of Things Unseen, there is a paucity of work from the '70s.

Maybe Fierke's work at the time was less rambunctious and drew less attention. Maybe it was large and ungainly and difficult to preserve. She did continue in her sculptural investigations, though, in addition to her printmaking, that much was recorded in the newspapers.

In a show of her art at All Souls Unitarian Church in Indianapolis in January 1973, Fierke displayed woodcuts, engravings and other prints done in a surrealistic style.  In April, at Editions Ltd., she exhibited watercolors, prints, sculpture and paintings.  

Fierke was among ten artists showing in an exhibition of a total of 35 works at a national print exhibit at Eppley Gallery of Morningstar College in Iowa. 

A June 1973 Philadelphia Inquirer article about a new gallery there at the time mentions that Fierke had recently exhibited work at D. Dedic Gallery in that city. 

She finished out that year with another Editions Ltd. show in November, in a group exhibition that included Robert Eagerton and Robert Berkshire.

By the 1974 Herron faculty show, reported in the February 13, Indianapolis News, Marion Garmel's eyes were drawn mainly to just one artist out of the group. That year, it was not to be Fierke. 

A narrative-driven, constructed environment, Mrs. Hennesy's Son Tries His Hand at Art and Fails? by Raymond Van De Water, was the hit of the show according to column's headline. 

One can gather from the write-up, that it was a bloody mess, literally, by design. 

It was an installation that took up one full corner of the gallery, and presented a cinematic snapshot of a Van Gogh-esque art student's living quarters, or crime scene, and the codified contents of its environ that Garmel describes in over two columns of her review.   

Aside such a wild and woolly work, all others must have paled in cacophony.    

Perhaps Marion Garmel, spent of her observational energies after taking in the Van De Water, is left to describe Fierke's work that year as best as she is able, with tired eyes, in the most cursory and rudimentary of words. 

Garmel writes about “one-time printmaker” Margaret (Peg) Fierke, as “rapidly...becoming the best carpenter on the Indianapolis art scene.”

Less Discord, More Melody.  

In 1975, Herron presented a combined show in two parts, Faculty Print Portfolio and Monotypes. 

Fierke participated on the Print Portfolio side, along with Jon Asher, Robert Cutter, Robert Eagerton and Robert Mark.

A year later in the Herron faculty show, Marion Garmel covers a seemingly new direction for Fierke, when she writes about her in The News, dated November 3, 1976. 

Within a subsection of the column headlined West Wind Blows, she writes about a possible change of direction for Fierke.  Garmel may be referring to a move away from her “unreal” work – work the writer  describes as “organic forms crawling around each other in fields of dotted space.” 

But toward what, exactly, was Fierke moving? 

Garmel is not really forthcoming in her remarks. Fierke shows new untitled drawing and paintings “picturing various courses of the elements...” is what she writes.  It's difficult to know what Garmel was seeing, by that description. 

A 'west wind' may refer, poetically, to a change coming. 'Various courses of the elements,' though, is so spartan a description, made up of so few and somewhat boring words  – maybe it meant something more to her readers then than I'm getting now. 

Garmel had been covering Fierke and her development in Indianapolis for many years by then. Maybe it would take fresh eyes to really see the artist anew, again.

In perhaps an unlikely location in a small town in rural Indiana, a new art gallery had taken root by 1977. Gallery owner Kit Basquin's Washington Gallery in Frankfort, Indiana, began showing Fierke's work. 

In May of that year, the gallery would have a two-person exhibit of drawings by Steve Mannheimer and prints by Margaret Fierke. 

A brief preview of the work was previewed in the April 28, 1977 Lafayette Journal and Courier, as follows,

“Mannheimer's figurative drawings reflect the influence of Goya. His paintings are abstract and conceptual....

Fierke's linear drawings and prints have organic and cartographic imagery.” 

A detailed review of the exhibit and fresh eyes on Fierke's works is contained in the Art Scene column to the same Lafayette paper, penned by Jackie Ullman, and appearing June 26.  

Ullman's thoroughly observant remarks regarding both artists' work are contained in the piece, but for the purposes of this blog, it is her remarks regarding Fierke that will be covered here,

“Margaret Fierke's drawings and prints  have a very linear quality. Her subject matter, however, is largely organic with flowing contours of land, mountains, trees and plantings. The precision of her lines (are) further softened by large areas of rounded shapes, many swirling lines, and pastel colors applied...”

The writer goes on to describe several different drawings and their various attributes, such as dual views within a single work (aerial and horizontal in the particular case cited), geometric abstraction in other piece, and grid-like or cartographic line, in others.  

Ullman saves what may have turned out to be her most prescient remarks for last, about Fierke, when she speaks about the some of the artist's smaller works, 

“Fierke's etchings and pen and ink drawings are small gems. They too employ organic imagery but are less chart-like in their character than her larger drawings. The works have been done with a light touch  by a person who has a highly personalized view of today's world and the many forms of life in it.”

Indeed, as we shall see.

In the next installment, Part Three, as the 1970s turn to the 1980s, Fierke's art will flow in a new and more pensive direction, away from the startling novelty of her earliest mash-ups and award winners, toward a more resolute quietude. 

Toward homages and odes to the flow of nature. 

To the graceful beauty of environmental forms.   

Mark Diekhoff, July 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.

Peg Fierke Art – Part One

 

Margaret “Peg” Fierke – Artist and Teacher 

In the tumultuous year 1968, amid the chaos and strife and destruction, the generative flow of life persevered. People fell in love, children learned in school, artists were inspired to create novel things of wonder. Humanity endured.  

Oceans and beaches suffered abuse, neglect and pollution, but the planet would survive. From the  bounty of the ocean, seashells still washed on the beach. 

Who can deny the beauty of the symmetrical perfection, the color, the textures of seashells? 

Of all things – exoskeletons –  logarithmic spirals made of calcium carbonate, and some divine smoke and mirrors.  

To Create Images, Break Rules and Lecture on Etching.

While a Master of Fine Arts student in her final year at University of Illinois, the art of Peg Fierke is introduced to the readers of a North Carolina newspaper, The Chapel Hill Weekly.  

On April 14, writer Virginia Read, in her The Graphic Arts column, covered the 2nd National Student Printmaker's Exhibition hosted at the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  

Ms. Read describes the overall show as follows,

“Seventy-five prints from art schools all over the country are on display. The first impression you get is of an almost feverish variety of techniques. Intaglio, woodcut, lithograph, serigraph, collagraph – some are in black and white, some in color, and many use a mixture of techniques.”

Of the many works, the writer makes mention of just a few she especially enjoyed, including “...Margaret Fierke's intaglio with its stained glass colors.” 

The following fall, Indiana art students and art readers would also meet Margaret Fierke as her post-graduate career would begin with her being hired as a lecturer in a printmaking department of an Indianapolis art school. 

The Indianapolis Star had a short piece on September 17 announcing the beginning of a new academic year at Herron School of Art.

“Herron...began its new academic year yesterday with the largest student body and faculty and added facilities in its 66 year history. 

The fulltime student enrollment is expected to increase from 258 last year to 280 this year...

The faculty will total 30 as compared to 26 last year.” 

The article introduces the new instructors as Gary L. Freeman and Stephen Robin in sculpture, James C. Hertter in visual communication, and pertinent to the discussion here, in printmaking, Margaret Fierke “who will teach etching.”

Within months of her arrival, Fierke will have an opportunity to discuss her art with an unnamed writer for The Indianapolis Star in an article appearing December 29, 1968.  

The Week in Indiana Art column includes an image of her work, described as an acrylic painting in the article, Omphalos.

Omphalos, Margaret 'Peg' Fierke

The article quotes Fierke at length, providing an insight into her motivations and interests at this early stage of her post-collegiate career,

“I am not protesting any wars or social conditions in my paintings and prints...

Rather, I create images in illusionary space which can't happen in actual space...I can draw something floating in space. I can make things transparent so that I can break the rules of what actually happens.”

The writer describes the quasi-organic imagery contained in many of Fierke's creations, a subject matter and style dubbed as 'organic surrealism' by a former Herron faculty member not named. The article describes the look as “...a juxtaposition of primitive life forms with mechanistic environmental elements.”

Fierke is further quoted, explaining the commingling of her design elements,

“All of this juxtaposing occurs on the two dimensional surface of a painting, drawing or print.

Therefore, any suggestion of space...is illusionary space. Within this illusionary space there can be ambiguities and occurrences which are contrary to physical reality.”

Even though stated so early in her career, Fierke's exploration of an organic and yet illusory space will continue, as we shall see.

The article concludes with a list of many of Fierke's early-career awards and achievements, too numerous to list here.  

Energetic Exhibition of Illusionary Space.

It was as she hit the ground running here in the city – a momentum and stride she would maintain over the following first months and years while teaching and producing art. 

As early as February 1969 several significant developments in her career were reported in the papers.

Fierke received a cash prize award for a drawing she exhibited at the American Drawing Biennial at the Norfolk (VA) Museum of Arts and Sciences as reported in The Indianapolis News February 8.   

On February 10, Fremont Power, a writer for the same paper, in his self-named column reported the art gallery start-up, Editions Ltd., and its first scheduled show for February 22 and 23 at the temporary location of Woodland Springs clubhouse near 116th and Keystone on the city's north side. 

Power reports Mrs. Robert S. (Joanne) Chappell and Joan Talesnick were business partners in the venture, both of whom had a a background in the arts and art education with studies at Indiana University. 

Numerous artists would be  participating in the first show with artworks numbering between 225 and 250 pieces. The column confirms Fierke's participation, along with other Herron faculty including Robert Eagerton and Gary Freeman.

In the February 16 Indianapolis Star, The Week In Indiana Art column, the Editions Ltd. First show is again previewed, along with a Fierke update,

“The Boston Printmakers 21st annual exhibition, March 4 to 30, will show a color intaglio print by Miss Margaret Fierke, lecturer at Herron...

'Omphalos,' the print, will be shown at the juried exhibition at Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

It won honorable mention in the Lafayette (Ind.) Art Center's 7th annual regional exhibition ...Another (Fierke) etching called 'Medallion' (is) also in that show.”

Just a couple of months later, The Indianapolis News, on April 10, would report on Fierke's continuing busy exhibition schedule as follows,

“Miss Margaret Fierke...will show an etching in the 21st national exhibition of prints in Washington's Library of Congress May 1 to Sept. 2. The print is entitled 'The Creation.'

The artist also has works in exhibitions in Wichita, Kan.; Terre Haute; Ypsilanti, Mich., and Dickinson, N.D.”     

The Creation, Margaret 'Peg' Fierke

An exhibition Young Printmakers 1970 opened at the Herron Museum of Art on February 2 of that year, as part of a Indiana University's Sesquicentennial celebration. 

The show was previewed by Indianapolis News writer Lorraine Price. The pictorial article contained an interview with Robert Eagerton, chairman of Herron's printmaking department discussing the booming art print market at the time, the advantages of the print medium and the means and methods of creating such works. 

Several photographs of students at work complete the article, including Betsey Bly, Becky Depositar, Vivian Morton, Donald Clanton and Peg Fierke. 

This article, we see, refers to Ms. Fierke as 'Peg,' the name most familiar in Indianapolis art circles from that time forward. 

A photograph shows her engrossed in her work engraving, as she bends her head over a copper plate. (See News photo by Jim Young at top of page)

A Formation Formed of Form. 

A work produced by Fierke at this time was the etching Three Sided Gravity.  It was a purchase award winner in the 13th North Dakota Annual Print and Drawing Exhibition at the University of North Dakota in April 1970.  

(A work by that same name is currently in the collection of Newfields, listed as ink on paper, etching and aquatint, created in 1969, inscribed as 1/10 and can be seen here.)  

The print defies easy explanation. It is a combination of flat, empty and three-dimensional space, of two-tone and color. The collage of its imagery changes as the eye darts about. From surreal to cartoonish to schematic.  

It may seem part Rube Goldberg and part M. C. Escher, but that's grasping at straws. It's hard to describe something so confusing and different looking. Looking back, we know now, it was, in whole, a Peg Fierke.  

As mentioned earlier, Fierke was among the first artists to be represented by the new Editions Ltd. gallery in Indianapolis. She was also to be among the last artists represented in a show at the Herron Gallery at its longstanding 16th Street location. By the autumn, the gallery would relocate and be rechristened at a brand new location at 1200 West 38th Street as the Indianapolis Museum of Art.   

The show was called Indiana Prints/ Drawings/Watercolors. 

Winners in each category were chosen by juror Charles C. Savage, curator of education at City Art Museum of St. Louis. First in Watercolors was Louise Johnson, first in Prints was Sharon Sklar and first in Drawings was Robert J. Cutter Jr. 

Fierke's Three Sided Gravity would continue its winning ways and earn a third place award in the Prints category in the show.

Peg Fierke also created two interesting constructions around this time.  We can be sure of at least two, as they are currently on display in the Herron School of Art and Design exhibition in their Marsh Gallery. 

The retrospective exhibit, Evidence of Things Unseen – Margaret “Peg” Fierke: Prints, Paintings, and Patterns of Discovery, runs through August 1. 

The constructions vaguely remind one of Robert Rauschenberg assemblies, if only in their unusual combination of seemingly unrelated materials and techniques that are difficult to describe, and exist somewhere between painting and sculpture. And also in their post Ab Ex figuration. 

Untitled, Margaret 'Peg' Fierke,
in the exhibition at Herron Galleries

Fierke's two pieces are somewhere between concept and drawing, abstract and meaning. 

She has moved her 2D works to the at least the next dimension. They are drawings, maybe, but with a dose of her smoke and mirrors. 

Since there are two specimens, seemingly of the same species, an attempt at pattern recognition can be at least attempted by the viewer.

A fallback is to again quote the earlier unnamed Indianapolis Star writer who described some of Fierke's work in 1968 as “...a juxtaposition of primitive life forms with mechanistic environmental elements.”  That description would seem apropos to what one sees in the two constructions. 

Both are listed as Plexiglass, ink and paper. Both contain an obsessive pattern of circles drawn to form a tight mesh in ink. Try as I might with my eyesight, I don't know. Were there ink marks on the Plexi itself, casting shadows onto the paper? Or was it layers of various colored ink creating a strange shallow volume to the plane. 

True to her word, there is certainly something illusionary about Fierke's space. 

The additional drawing elements in the two works, besides the woven-mat effects described, are of that commingling of organic and mechanistic forms. 

Pipes, brackets, guide-wires –  even a shower head –  versus bulbous, organic somethings or the other.  

Perhaps difficult to describe, but a recognizable style for Fierke was beginning to take shape. 

Classroom Happening.

In addition to her energetic exhibition schedule, Fierke's growing popularity as a Herron instructor is noted in another pictorial article about her appearing in the December 26, 1970, Indianapolis News. The article describes Fierke's unorthodox, at times, teaching methods, popular with her students,

“In a drawing class this year, Miss Fierke projected color slides onto a model's body while hard-rock music played in the background. The students naturally loved it, and Miss Fierke, just as naturally, is regarded as one of the most popular instructors at Herron.”

 The article has several photographs of Fierke at work in her studio, doing drawing studies of seashells and using an airbrush on a large painting, as examples. The photo spread provides insight into her interests and working methods at this time. 

The painting is not named, and its whereabouts are unknown, but we see in the photograph, it is in the ballpark of style of her wonderfully weird Three Sided Gravity.

An examination of Peg Fierke's art in the 1970s and 1980s will continue in Part Two of this series to follow.

Mark Diekhoff, July 2026

See Also: Herron Galleries

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 Source – A Group Show of Artists Organized by Kyng Rhodes at Newfields

Speak No Evil, Marcus Robins

The Source

Ponder the source. Is it a place, a point of time, an initial urge, a spark of inspiration?

Such an open-ended concept. It conjures visions both personal and metaphysical. 

Perhaps an individual thinks of mother, father, child – love. On the wider scale of nature and the planet, words such as earth, its clay and garden –  its river of life.  Those spiritual among us may think of a creator. Those philosophical may imagine some rational origin of the universe itself. Humanists may think of the beginning of us; people, language, psyche and myth.  And the ways and the customs –  from first history, forward.  

And what is a source as compared to a soul. Are they not each both essential and original? 

Kyng Rhodes has organized a show of artists, The Source. It is an exhibition that speaks to his answer of such questions and displays artists whose works provide their answers as well.

The show is described in the exhibition statement that accompanies the work, a portion of which is quoted as follows,

“The Source brings together works that examine the identities, histories, and shared experiences of the African diaspora. Through painting, fashion, and other forms of artistic expression, the exhibit considers both inherited histories and contemporary realities...”

It features artwork by Lyndy Bazile, Phylicia Carr, Aaron Coleman, Deonna Craig, India Cruse-Griffin, Caleb Davis-Barney, Fitz, Gary Gee, Quintin Griffin, Michael Angelo W, Kevin Nance-West, Francis Nwosu, Andre Parnell, Dana Powell-Smith, Marcus Robins, Ash Robinson and Tania Wineglass. 

Pattern's Thread.

When approaching the glass wall entry and doors to the gallery, the visitor confronts an image of endurance and generative strength with the large oil on canvas painting, Duo Body Bather, by Lyndy Bazile. 

Bazile's colors are simplified with warm tones of orange and yellow in the background and cool blue and teal for the figure and the pool of water. A divided two has become a more powerful one in a nurturing water. Rest and peace seem to bend the two heads of the figure toward sleep, although their eyes remain open and aware. Combined they appear as mighty as a mountain, or at least a rock upon which a mountain is made.

Once inside the space of the gallery, the visitor is surrounded by a number of works that share a similar energy and color as contained in Bazile's painting.

Duo Body Bather, Lyndy Bazile

Phylicia Carr's Surrender shows a woman in a sinuous profile. Her body seems to support a canopy of natural bounty – flowers, leaves, fruit – as if she if the trunk and roots upon which the bounty is supported and conveyed. In addition to the woman's graceful lines, the canvas is enlivened with motion by a striped pattern of parallels running across a background of teal and yellow. The overall vibe of the work is one of reward – to accept and endure, and to flourish. 

The painting Soul Sista by Fitz also shows a woman at a center of a patterned color picture plane. The painting is a feisty and playful portrait of the protagonist named.  Fitz has created her, stylized her with the power of a comic book hero. How so? She is an alluring wild woman, dressed in bright orange, animal print, cut-off shorts and a top of only green leafy vines. 

Her make-up and golden arm bracelets only heighten the transfixing attention she commands.  She is pictured amid a busy background of orange, black, blue, brown and gold. Recurring chevron shapes point up and down, left and right, but try as they may, they cannot distract the eye from the figure herself.

Come see about me, Dana Powell-Smith

Dana Powell-Smith's acrylic painting, Come see about me, is a head and shoulders portrait of mainly orange, but also blue and green against a black background. The painting is a picture of pattern  and color more than a likeness or emotional study. The woman emerges from the her many pieces. Polka dots, flowers, stripes and color fields make up the planes and surface of the face and costume. The eyes stare out calmly at the viewer from the stylized orchestra of pattern of almost cubist design.

Andre Parnell's Waking Perceptions is a puzzle and a poem. A child is realistically portrayed in facial features and anatomy, although colored as if carved from marble or dusted by chalk. The child is the age of cherubs often portrayed in historical art. That age just beyond the blissful innocence of the baby years, yet before the school days of regimented learning.  

Atop the child's head are at least twenty newborn-looking babies – infants snuggling and sleeping all among each other, in a form that suggests either a hair style or hat at first glance. Atop them all, one among them has aroused from the peace of sleep, with head held high, eyes opened, surprised, and lips parted as if to speak or cry. 

Waking Perceptions, Andre Parnell

The larger main figure looks out from beneath what goes on above its head, that is, the stirring little one awakened, and presents pursed lips, a look of uncertainty, and a downward glance away from the viewer.  

Speak No Evil by Marcus Robins (top of page) is a dreamlike tableau created with the lifelike surrealism of a type seen in an artist like Salvador Dali. Components float, hover and arrange about the picture in a freeze-frame that can be experienced as a homage to the title of Maya Angelou's debut memoir from 1969. 

A gilded bird's cage confines a person's head within its shiny bars. The person's face is further restrained by a gilded mask that covers the nose and mouth.  Outside the shimmering prison, a bird is free, its wings fully extended in climbing flight. But is the freedom real?  Is the bird real?  It is mostly translucent as if carved from glass or ice, or formed of a soap bubble.  But with a girdle of gold  banded across its body, its form is dissected. It is both solid and see-through at the same time. 

The room of the cage and the person and the bird, is full of floating or falling flower petals. Perhaps a pointing, golden arrow is a clue. It is aiming toward the bottom of the picture, so perhaps the petals are pulled by gravity, falling down.

Heritage Visualized.

Walking further into the gallery, shared histories and experiences are revealed.  Two photographic prints by Francis Nwosu each convey with a simple visual clarity more open-ended themes. A hand reaches, grasping with out-stretched fingers in Ascension, and a hand cradles the warmth of bright light in Illumination I.

India Cruse-Griffin's Tangled Yet Not Broken is a mixed media sculpture of a young woman wrapped in a drapery of clothing, cloths-lines and clothes-pins. Her glance is cast downward, her eyes are almost closed, her arms are limp at her side. But her stature is standing, her head high on her shoulders. She seems resolute in her work. 

(This blog covered the  busy season of exhibition by Cruse-Griffin earlier this year, here) 

Daddy's New Car by Kevin Nance-West shows a car at a time when they were mighty and large, perhaps the late 1940s or early 1950s behind two boys at a time when they were  just growing and small. About the first years of school age, the boys face the viewer, and an uncertain future. It is a vision from the past and toward the future. A movement seems promised by the engine and the wheels and by the youth of the boys. 

(Nance-West's recent solo exhibit at Harrison Center was also covered by this blog, here)

More abstract is Aaron Coleman's It Was All So Simple, a 16-layer screen print. It is a mix of elements including text, color, graffiti marks. The location is an abandoned storefront, its security gate with a discarded car license plate and a fallen store-hours sign.  

The main message is the text in block letters which is a close paraphrase a song lyrics passed from generation to generation, from Barbara Streisand to Wu-Tang Clan. Of course song lyrics often quote the common questions asked of people about love and life and the true meaning of things. Perhaps it was just such a message painted on a wall that Coleman saw. Regardless of the source of inspiration, it lingers in its image of fading paint, a nostalgic mirage of better times.

Both abstract and real is Deonna Craig's mixed media Of Ceremony and Captivity: Scarred. At a distance it is a monochrome work a dark gray/black. Woodchip pieces, coated with paint the same color as the picture's ground –  a deep charcoal. 

Rows and rows and column upon column of the pieces – as if tick marks on a tally sheet – attempting to number the innumerable. Each piece unique and singular in itself, but nameless in the overall crowd. 

Is this a record of a thousand injuries and insults that have left their burns and scars, or a broad and somber totem of a people's endurance? Or is something holier or more transcendent imagined in the rite of darkness it portrays? 

An interesting ceramic piece, a portrait bust or mask of sorts by Gary Gee, is Head on a Swivel. 

A street smart man with wide open eyes that allow you to peer into the depths of his brain. Graffiti marks lurk in the shadows there, in contrast to the gold grill on several teeth of his wide grin. There is something uneasy in his baring of teeth. And it's certainly something different than happiness or a joke we see when we view the head from the rear. Eyeballs all over the red cap look out in all directions.  

Sticking to the streets, is Quintin Griffin's photograph, Red Line. A sunlit scene is shown from a slightly elevated, bird-on-a-wire view. A single figure, just one man alone, surrounded by some of his things on the bench next to him and the ground at his feet. 

A geometric jumble of repeating urban forms surround him – three hanging stop lights above, three pylons to the side, a row of glass panes behind him and countless car lot, light bulbs stringing across the picture. The replication and repetition of these inanimate things draw attention to the figure and his solitude. There is no wood or lawn on this Woodlawn Avenue high noon. Just concrete and asphalt, metal, brick and glass – and the flesh and blood of a breathing man.

Sight and Seen.

At the rear of the gallery space are a few pieces in which fashion and decoration step forward. 

Say What?, Ash Robinson

Say What? is a mixed media wall piece by Ash Robinson. It seems a head portrayed in the hard-edged, simple lines of a retro 1980s decoration. It even has a mirror element at the center face of the work, that absorbs the viewer and reflects their image back.  But unlike the shiny chrome and brass of '80s design, the mirror here is black. The surrounding forms and textures in black and white and brown vary from matte to tufted and fabric-like, to stained wood and louvered.

Da Genesis, an oil on canvas painting by Caleb Davis-Barney, is perhaps the most abstract of all artworks in the show. It has color fields, organically shaped of white, ivory, brown, black and blue. It is perhaps a natural world that inspires the work, with its moon-like sphere, cloud and flower forms, and the color of land and sea. Maybe, though, it is not so abstract at all, and it shows the days of creation at the beginning of time. Land, sea and moon are easily imagined. Perhaps the painting's patterns allude to the people created days later, and their later urge to beauty and decoration shared by all descendants  around the globe. 

Da Genesis, Caleb Davis-Barney

La Vierge au Long Cou by Tania Wineglass, is a glazed clay stonewear portrait plaque that is reminiscent of porcelain miniatures in the intimate connection and subject matter of personal portraiture. It's exotic title may reflect some broader meaning than the happiness the viewer can't help but share with the dazzle of the smiling lady portrayed.

High fashion is presented in Nigel Badman's footwear and handbag designs.  Italian pebble-grained leather, pony hair, suede and cotton are the components of the tasteful pieces. 

The Variegated Tote is a bag with an overall pyramidal form. This shape is clothed in three colors, in a checkerboard of squares and stripes. The palomino pony top handles blend seamlessly into the vertical stripes that band together at the bag's center, between the checks.   

The Princeton Loafer design appears both casual and elegant. Simple intersecting lines and the pebble grain, and the maker's mark embossed into the leather, complete a minimal and pleasing look.

Heritage, voice, pattern and fashion are all rolled into one in the final artwork in The Source.

Standing at the back of the show in a corner is War Is Always Ugly, a fashion design, or maybe a post modern textile, by Michael Angelo W.  

It is created – sewn together – with  cloth described as 'upcycled USGI military top-load bags and black ticking stripe cotton. '  Or said another way, the rough and ready fabric of sturdy work wear (or mattresses) and Army duffel bags.  

Weariness, toil and sacrifice are implied by the use of these materials, and a point of view, by its title.  But Michael Angelo W's ensemble of clothing is statement enough. We see power and style, loud and clear. 

War Is Always Ugly (detail), Michael Angelo W

The Source is a many-faceted display of art mediums and techniques. The show is displayed in the Brett Waller Gallery at Newfields through August 16. 

Mark Diekhoff, July 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.