The Art of Carla Knopp - Part Four

Corporeality, Carla Knopp, 1999

Avenue of Lost and Change.

By 1995, the downtown Indianapolis gallery scene was evolving. Places were closing and places were opening on Massachusetts Avenue. Re-locations were occurring away from that Avenue to Vermont Street and Alabama Avenue. Two large art enclaves, also downtown, were gaining steam nearby with the Stutz Building to the west and the Faris Building to the south.

As Carla Knopp continued her decade-long art journey through a changing art world, Steve Mannheimer reflected on the same prior ten years of the downtown Indianapolis art scene up to that point in the mid '90s. His observations were contained in the preamble to his review of two shows opening in April 1995, one of which was at Utrillo Gallery, an upstart space owned and ran by Greg Brown on the city's Near Eastside. 

The column's title was Local art scene is still jumping but not on Mass Ave and appeared in the April 9, 1995, Indianapolis Star. 

In just a few opening paragraphs, he described the state of the city's contemporary art scene of the prior ten years,

“During the last half of the 1980s, the health of the local art scene was gauged by the traffic through the galleries along Massachusetts Avenue. Opening night block parties did not always generate sales, but the masses on Mass. Ave. created the perception that art was...indispensable...

There was even a sort of local 'school' …, particularly the younger painters, who exhibited on Massachusetts.

It never attained nor aspired to the status of an official Indianapolis style – but...(this group) reinforced some mutual tendencies, toward painterly technique, vaguely disquieting content and a distant kinship to the expressionistic tone of the national scene of the day.

Some of the those galleries have disappeared. Others have evolved. Artists who had hoped those bubbly times would elevate their careers have been mostly disappointed.” 

The savvy real estate entrepreneurs and developers had a master plan as early as their first lease on that street to Patrick King in 1983, as covered earlier in this blog.  That plan was coming to fruition. It was a common multi-stage plan of gentrification using art and artists as the fuel, an early catalyst, and, like a rocket ship, when the boost of the first stage was spent, they would be shed away, cast off by stratospheric rent hikes, and abandoned to float or sink.

Essential, Folk, Outsider and Found.

So amid the change of this period, Greg Brown's Utrillo Gallery opened in 1995.  It would be an important venue for the work of Carla Knopp.

The location at 2630 East 10th Street was in an untapped art area of the Near Eastside.  

According to a March 16, 1997, Indianapolis Star feature article about him and his gallery by S. L. Berry,  Brown described the plentiful storefronts and cheap rents, and saw not only a prime location for his gallery, but for a future alternative scene to add to Mass Ave area and the loft buildings. 

An early and essential show at Utrillo was covered by Steve Mannheimer in the April 9, 1995, Indianapolis Star mentioned above.  

That show, World in Balance was an exhibition that,

“...features a dozen or so mobiles and collages by Indianapolis artist Gwendolyn Skaggs...

Gravity provides the only glue. Everything is suspended by a thread or loose wire and hangs together only by the grace of a still room...

Skaggs likes the precariousness of it all."

Mannheimer then quotes the artist and concludes his thoughts, 

" 'For each of these objects there is only one direction and one position in which it can hang. It fits my concept of living.'

...Skaggs has created a complete aesthetic: Her method is her metaphor – and vice versa.”

Brown would operate at that location for a couple of years, and then would move locations by 1998 to a building at 3318 East 10th Street. 

2630 East 10th Street as it appears today,
location of first Utrillo Gallery

Utrillo's would present what may be the most eclectic range of art and artists in the city during those times, with shows that included the intriguingly titled Sgt. Joe Griffith's Paintings of: The Kennedy Assassination in February 1998, a show of his own paintings called Cardboard and Canvas a few months later, as well as found art, folk art and thrift store art over the following months and years. 

Artists, in addition to Carla Knopp, included the quasi-outsider, Harry Blomme, and the iconoclastic self-proclaimed Allist, Jan Scott Boyer.  

In a 1998 exhibition, Utrillo Gallery presented Passionate Visions: Contemporary Folk Art of the South, selections from the personal collection of Robert Dawson, an IUPUI media studies teacher. 

S.L. Berry of the Indianapolis Star would preview the show in a Visual Arts column on July 21 of that year.

The writer described paintings as the primary focus of Dawson's collection, quoting the collector as follows,

“I especially like memory paintings...things that people paint later in their lives when they're recalling events or experiences or places in their past.”  

Berry also quotes Greg Brown about the show,

“The fine art community and the folk art community are starting to understand one another. This show is a conduit for furthering that.”

In March of 1999, Utrillo Gallery would exhibit the found-object creations of homeless outsider, William Talley. Later that same year in August, Greg Brown would exhibit his own collection of thrift shop prints and copies by French street scene painter, Maurice Utrillo, the inspirational namesake of his gallery.     

Carla Knopp would exhibit at Utrillo Gallery on several occasions, with painting shows including Villages in 1996, May Flowers in 1997 and  American Legion Show in 1999. 

She would also co-produce the gallery's public-access TV show with Brown, a further conduit of of connection between the street, outsider and folk art scenes and fine arts in the city.

Mapping the Ineffable in Multi-Dimensions.

Spelunker, Carla Knopp, 1999

It is perhaps fitting that Carla Knopp would show at Utrillo during the gallery's run in the mid-to-late 1990s.  

Folk art collector Robert Dawson's description of 'memory painting' might well apply to the surreal landscapes produced by Knopp during this time. But Knopp's paintings, although perhaps personal in part, seemed tapped into a broad and ancient memory bank –  or maybe timeless is the better word. A boundless collective store of information –  pre-conscious, post-conscious, unconscious, – consisting of an archetypal alien vocabulary of dreamy mysterious hieroglyphs. 

During this period, she captures views of un-graspable vistas, not nightmares or unnerving, but strange, pleasant harmonies of color and characters captured from yelping spurs of thought, memory or imagination.

Corporeality, 1999, paints a picture (top of page), labeled with that word, of  an all-seeing vine that tangles a grid between a bizarre rounded rise of snow, and a warm-colored sky. A prone snowman of sorts is rolling down a slope toward the viewer. Eerie eyeballs of gray, yellow and orange form a stack of spheres in the 'sky' echoed by the three spheres of the puffy 'snowman' below. It is an inexplicable scene, but of such pleasing colors and soft, rounded forms – two worlds, one painted cold and one colored warm –  divided by the bristling vines that guard the wonder of the winter scene from the sunset eyes in the sky.

Spelunker, 1999,  (above) alludes to cave exploration, and is an image that could be equally at home on a Robert Heinlein paperback or a shoegaze CD; the muted range of color and the hazy atmosphere, the segmented mechanics of the insectoid reptile to the left and the graceful and organic symmetry of the blinded weedflower to the right. 

There is a slight orientation of the interior landscape by a central columnar rocky form, but the scene seems to shift in the distance from a peaceful pastoral in shades of purple to a skull-like menace with an orange orb of an eye, and even into a presiding figure with outstretched arms, if you stare long enough. 

Both Corporeality and Spelunker contain the interplay of otherworldly biomorphic vegetation with serene circular forms seen in Knopp's earlier painting, Land of Poetry and Harmless Snakes. 

In two additional pictures from the period, we see the glimmering golden green of Arcadian landscapes, populated not by people, but by peculiarities. 

Tippi's Water Garden, Carla Knopp, 1999

Tippi's Water Garden, 1999, presents of a small dog, knee-deep in water, at the edge of a pond. A tennis ball floats nearby but the pooch seems to be looking past it. In the waters beyond, perhaps the dog is seeing things. Various animal forms – a bird, a bug, a teddy bear. Teeming things among the moss-covered rocks.

Another greenish gold picture, marvelously funny and charming, is Victorian Gray, 1999. The painting shows a steam-punk flying saucer, decorated with fussy brocade, hovering lopsided above a hilly pasture, seen between two trees. 

The 'gray' is a classic alien of the 'man from Mars' type. The being is enclosed in a soap bubble sphere atop the fancy-dress spacecraft –  or great grandma's lampshade –  whatever the case may be.   

Carla Knopp will exhibit less frequently in Indianapolis over the following few years. However, by about 2007, she will appear again with exhibits at several different venues with her ever evolving  artworks in the ever evolving art scene, as we shall see in Part 5.

Victorian Gray, Carla Knopp, 1999

Mark Diekhoff, May 2026

See also:

Greg Brown - Utrillo Gallery photos at flickr

Harry Blomme exhibition at Utrillo Gallery article by Mary Lee Pappas, NUVO.net

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 Three

Morning On Earth, Carla Knopp

In Vivo Cross-Fertilization.

Part Two ended with Carla Knopp's show of oil painting portraits in June 1991 at Artigliography, a gallery located at 415 Massachusetts Avenue, in a group show called Oils, Prints and Holography. That date was just a month after the planned, but canceled, exhibit of the her same works at the Hindman Gallery, which closed suddenly at the end of April.

By summer's end, Bill Adkin's formerly of 431 Gallery and most recently, Hindman's, would hang a shingle again on Mass Ave, again at the address 431, but upstairs. Steve Mannheimer, in his weekly arts column, Visual Arts, in The Indianapolis Star, would re-introduce Adkins and the launch of his latest venture in an article on September 1, 1991,

“Named the In Vivo Galley, it is the latest – maybe the last for a long time – project of art maven and once-and-future gallery director Bill Adkins.

   Last March, Adkins announced that he had persuaded his employer, Marge Hindman, to expand her Geist Reservoir gallery to include a branch showroom above the 431 Gallery along the city's Downtown art spine.

   A month later, and barely 24 hours before Hindman, Adkins and the landlord were to ink the contract, Hindman's lawyer departed the world – and took the deal with him.

   Hindman found a new lawyer. He didn't think much of Adkin's idea. The deal fell from limbo into perdition.

   While she was at it, Hindman decided to close that half of her gallery devoted to contemporary art – the half where Adkins worked.”

As it would turn out, Adkins, with wife Julie, decided to seek financing and open In Vivo themselves. As Mannheimer further described,

“(In September 1991...) In Vivo Gallery will open its first show. The exhibiting artists will be members of the Indianapolis Artists Forum, which despite its officious title, is an informal association of youngish Indianapolis painters.

   They are Rex Alexander, Terry Copen, Katherine Ellis Copen, Brian Fick, Anita Giddings, Jonathan Grober, Holly Jackson, Carla Knopp, Steve Paddack and Ed Sanders.”

Mannheimer quotes Bill Adkin's aspirations for the gallery, as reflected in its name, In Vivo, a Latin phrase meaning 'in life,'

“It is a living active thing that you can see evolve before your own eyes. It represents what is happening right here in our own city. (The gallery offers) the dealer and the patron a chance to actually become a significant part of that creative process. The patron plays as much a role in the evolution of art as the artists. 

   Instead of contributing to art history by purchasing something that is already established somewhere else, you're actually helping to mold the future aesthetic direction of your own environment.” 

A few months later, Steve Mannheimer will review an exhibit of Brian Fick and Rex Alexander at In 

Vivo in his April 5, 1992, column in The Star, headlined Goofy Yet Gloomy.  The writer describes not only the works of those two artists, but In Vivo's roster in general, as he tries to put his finger on the unifying theory connecting all the Indianapolis Downtown Mass Ave artists, particular those at In Vivo. 

First, about Fick, Mannheimer writes,

“(Brian Fick's Bicycle...is one of (his) better recent pieces, another scene from an ongoing semi-symbolic, semi-narrative reconstitution of the artist's life. 

   And it is yet another scene from the goofy, gloomy theater of paintings that Fick and his friends have produced during the past few years in a collective illustration of their lives in this city and their take on it...

   (Bicycle and other current works) are more generic and thus more allegorical, more open to speculation.

   What is certain, though, is a peculiar bittersweet flavor of comedy and melancholy.”   

 

Bicycle, Brian Fick, c. 1992

And in a give and take Mannheimer had with Adkin's as they strolled the gallery, about the style of not only Fick, but Steve Paddack and others artists on the roster, he quotes Adkins, 

“ 'It's a common vein that flows through a lot of the work we show,' says gallery owner Bill Adkins. He gestures at a large painting by one of Fick's contemporaries, Steve Paddack. It depicts two empty, rather dilapidated rooms, 'dead ends,' Adkins calls them.

   Adkins admits, 'Many potential patrons...think the works are too gloomy or too intense. It's true that we think less in terms of decoration and more in terms of commentary on the artist's environment. Our artists let a certain psycho-social concern come through.' ”

Mannheimer sums up his observations by again going all-in collective, as he explains the connections among Rex Alexander's work and that of the other gallery artists,

“Despite the elegance (of Rex Alexander's 'tasteful' and 'meditative' 'almost abstractions'), the elegy is the same song sung in the bop and glop of Fick and Paddack –  and to varying degrees in the work of other gallery artists Ed Sanders, Jean Salzman, Terry Copen, Carla Knopp, Thomas Fellner, Gretchen Hancher and Anita Giddings.

   All are united in the underlying premise that their collective scene is uneasy with the grand visions imposed by billboard optimism. These artists have slid into a slough of cultural claustrophobia cluttered with unknowable signs and portents.

   Standing hip-deep in this cold stew, they react with an expression equally sneer and giggle and a certain playful willingness to paint with the muck.”

A month later, In Vivo would present Paintings by Holly Jackson and Carla Knopp.  Unfortunately, the show was not reviewed by the daily papers, and the catalog of Knopp's work in the show is difficult to know. 

House of Zod, Carla Knopp

A painting from the time that may serve as hint is House of Zod.  It is an unusual picture, painterly, of minimal content yet possessing a shimmering beauty and spaciousness. 

The interior of some unknown building – some old wooden workshop, or stable or bar –  is filled with a  couple of unrecognizable objects; a spiky bio-morph at the left edge of the painting and a small vertical white object atop a tall table or counter to the right. The scene contains just one semi-clear image, that of a disembodied steering wheel. Rudimentary in appearance, like off of an antique tractor, the tri-spoked wheel sits on the floor of an interior of shimmering gold. An infusion of promise and loss are more felt than seen in the broken luster of the room.  

It is a painting with the In Vivo-style espoused by Adkins, and ascertained by Mannheimer, well within the realm of damaged beauty on dead end avenue.  An artwork seriously at play –  giddy in the golden goop.

Seminal Shows and Pivotal Paintings.

Carla Knopp's association with In Vivo Gallery would result in an extraordinarily busy and prolific period in her early career. The year 1993, in particular, she participated in two shows just in the last half of that year. But she and her artworks were well represented for the entire period that In Vivo operated from 1991 through 1996.

A group show of seventeen In Vivo Gallery artists was held in September, 1993, the opening show of that fall's season,  and included Knopp. The show was reviewed by Steve Mannheimer in his Indianapolis Star column at the time. Ruschman Gallery, on Mass Ave as well, was also showing its group of artists at the time, and Mannheimer used his column to express the distinctions between the group shows. To get the gist of his reaction and subsequent thesis, the article is quoted at length,

“Gallery group shows are curious affairs. Generally, they mean nothing more than 'Here are the artists this gallery represents.' Rarely, if ever, do such broad spectrum selections demonstrate anything other than the gallery owner's taste – or at least the sense of which artists may have sold in the past.

   In Ruschman's case, this makes for a smorgasbord. Fine individual pieces by individual artists have little to say to each other. Certainly, there are some similarities of imagery among the artists, but it's almost a matter of coincidence...

   On occasion, however, a group show may reveal something deeper. Then, the gallery selection seems to reinforce some set of sensibilities widely held among the artists shown.

   All of the work seems a mood, in the same aesthetic ballpark and, thus, from the same psychic corner of day. That's the case with In Vivo.”  

 

Mannheimer explains further,

“Most of  the 43 works at In Vivo share a certain rough-and-ready approach to materials with more emphasis on textural exuberance than technical finesse.  

   The air of informality bespeaks of a modesty of means more than any lack of artistic ambition. Carla Knopp's Wagon Train and Ed Sander's Dwarf Pope are oil sketches aimed at some of painting's most venerable traditions.

   What unites all of this work is a generally wry or ironic attitude that just as readily expresses 

itself in buoyant splashes of color...”  

  

Just a month later, perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by critic's demand (or nudging), In Vivo would present a two-person show of Carla Knopp and Ed Sanders, in an exhibit described as 'mingled' new paintings. 

The show was previewed by Nan Hoffman in The Indianapolis News on November 11, 1993.  Knopp's contributions included small oil paintings, described as “painterly and humorous” in the article, whereas Sander's painters were described as “larger, more brutal works in oil.” 

Knopp's work Morning on Earth (top of page) was included in the show. The painting shows a development in which the artist depopulates her paintings. Recall her works from the mid-1980s were often figural quips or peopled, allegorical tableaux. But Morning on Earth presents an almost empty environment of  rolling landscape, colored by orange grass and red and pink hills. Its vivid, saturated hues, almost garish, attract the eye like a Dr. Seuss book to its page. Atop a crest of the rolling orange meadow, that is punctuated all over with a razor stubble of protruding sticks, sits an old fashioned wind-up alarm clock, tiny in the scheme of things, but jumping out from the canvas, with time reading 7:17. 

The picture's theme and a title that will recur, as we shall see, in many artworks by Knopp in the days, even decades, to come.   

Again, just a month or so later, Steve Mannheimer will visit In Vivo and present his findings in an article in The Star dated December 19. In it he covered the two-person show of Carla Knopp and Ed Sanders. It would be the most thoughtful and deep look at Knopp's work in Indianapolis to that date. The theme of the column's opening paragraphs is a 'twins separated by birth' tale,

“Ed Sanders and Carla Knopp...have been friends for years. They graduated from the same art school, drank at the same bars, attended the same parties and probably have had more than a few conversations about what matters on canvas.

   But that was the extent of (it)...

   It certainly doesn't explain why their work should appear to be cut so much from the same artistic cloth...  

   ...it was a sustained surprise to the artists when they came to install the exhibition...the two spent a good part of the day oohing and ahhing about the parallels,  and decided to take full advantage of them.

   Thus, we see such side-by-side pairings as Knopp's Birththrust with Sanders' The Plant, or face-to-face comparisons between Sanders' Last Day in Eden and Knopp's Recluse.

   At points, the similarities are startling, enough to give the viewer a few moments of pause attempting to guess who did which without reading the labels.” 

Well-Blessed Swim, Carla Knopp

Portrait of Innocent X, Ed Sanders

Mannheimer goes on the describe the techniques employed by the artists, and the resulting images,

“Both painters apply their paint in a loose, wet-on-wet technique that tends to evolve – or devolve... – into a tight range of colors hesitating between muddy sidewalks and rainbow sherbet on a foggy day.

   The visual effect is not unappealing; it is just more true than beautiful. Theirs is an urban and pedestrian vision rather than an academic one...

...Their images may be found in an emotional range as muddled as their colors, equally free of either brilliant highlights or dark stark shadows.

   Any heroics are tempered by discord; moments of poetry are short and idiosyncratic – as may be witnessed but not deciphered in works like Knopp's charmingly cryptic Gifted and Lucky or Sanders' Drapery.

   Similarly, their humor is oblique and laughter somewhat strangled – as in her quirky Morning on Earth or his Buck-Toothed Idol.” 

Gifted and Lucky, Carla Knopp

Mannheimer finally abandons his first impressions regarding lost twins and the like, and settles on a more carefully crafted, and novel, hypothesis, 

“If anything, (Knopp and Sanders) demonstrate the artistic equivalent of evolutionary convergence, where two separate species exhibit surprisingly similar appearances  perhaps due to adaptive responses to similar circumstances...

   It does seem a safe bet...that these two have their mutual fingers on some detectable but spiritually syncopated pulse of our times and our town.”    

 

Viva In Vivo!

By 1995, In Vivo Gallery had relocated from Mass Ave to 326 East Vermont. Steve Mannheimer discussed In Vivo's move, and the trial and tribulations of trying to sell its artists' works to corporate types, with gallery owner Bill Adkins in a column printed in the March 26 Star. 

   (The column also covered a solo exhibition at Ruschman Gallery and a three-person show at Chatham Gallery, a newer space on Mass Ave.)  

   The show at In Vivo was a group show, including long-standing artists Ed Sanders, Steve Paddack, Brian Fick, Carla Knopp, Holly Jackson, Doug Travis, Anita Giddings, Rex Alexander, Terry Copen, Becky Wilson, Madison Webb, Mark Jennings and Jesse Speight. Newer artists included Stephanie Newman, Jean Salzmann, Sandy Hauanio, Ralph Domenico, Besty Stirratt, and Craig McDaniel.

   Mannheimer described the overall vibe of In Vivo's multitude of offerings,

“More often than not, the work is technically grittier, more vaguely expressionistic, generally more mysterious and disquieted than...Corporate art.”

Mannheimer quotes Adkin's about the conundrum,

“A group of corporate clients came to our gallery once to look a show and they just walked around muttering to themselves...'Not hangable.' 

   ...In Vivo is a gallery for people who want to consider art more than decoration. I won't apologize for the fact that this art makes you think. If people want Muzak art, they should go to the mall.”

 

Carla Knopp's last show solo show at In Vivo would be at the Vermont Street location in June, 1995. The show was called Digging for Fire after a lyric from the similarly titled Pixies song from 1990. 

The song was by a band that was to be hugely influential on the later group Nirvana, and thus the entire grunge-era '90s. 

Its lyrics tell a simple story, in two verses, of an old woman, and then an old man. One kneeling in a hole, one sleepless on a bench. Each on a tireless quest –  not searching for some buried treasure or expecting some jackpot at the end of the rainbow,  but digging for fire. That was each their desire, right where they were. The omniscient voice of the singer, whether Black Francis or some anonymous troubadour he imagined into existence, acknowledges that the man, in verse two, lives in a town where the singer, himself, will someday live.  

A painting of flaming gold and alien foliage from the show Digging for Fire by Carla Knopp is Land of Poetry and Harmless Snakes. It is technically gritty, vaguely expressionistic and more mysterious and disquieted than corporate art. But there is something more to its song.

All these years later, it bellows like a plea screamed from beneath an opiated bridge or from inside a  gardener's backyard loft. A plea for something better, something good, something beautiful. A guttural plea – she answered with a painting –  that has outlasted Muzak, and even the mall. 

Land of Poetry and Harmless Snakes, Carla Knopp

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 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

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