Exhibitions

Opening June 17th, closing August 1st

Margaret “Peg” Fierke taught printmaking at Herron School of Art and Design for nearly four decades, shaping generations of artists while maintaining a rigorous studio practice as a printmaker and painter.

This exhibition celebrates Fierke’s life, work, and enduring legacy as an educator, mentor, and artist. Drawn from works preserved in Fierke’s studio and estate, Evidence of Things Unseen brings together prints and paintings spanning her career, with a particular focus on works created between the 1980s and early 2000s.

The exhibition highlights Fierke’s fascination with science, nature, and the hidden structures that shape the world around us. Her prints and paintings draw connections between the microscopic and the monumental, evoking cellular forms, topographic landscapes, evolving ecosystems, and the subtle patterns that emerge from seemingly chaotic systems. Through layered compositions, repeated motifs, and vibrant fields of color, Fierke approached art as a process of exploration and discovery, investigating phenomena that are often sensed through their effects rather than directly observed. Though her work can be found in numerous public and private collections, Fierke’s greatest legacy may be the generations of artists she taught and inspired.

Decades after her arrival at Herron in the late 1960s, her influence continues to reverberate through the school and the broader artistic community. This exhibition offers an opportunity to encounter both the remarkable body of work she created, and the lasting impact of a life dedicated to curiosity, experimentation, and creative inquiry.

Virtual Link

Location / Room - Berkshire, Reese, and Paul galleries

Dates and Times - July 15 - October 31

735 West New York Street Indianapolis Indiana 46202

Sunlight on the Sea Floor considers shared experiences of militarization, migration, and displacement through the work of twelve international artists, arguing for the importance of art and archives within urgent work on the global legacies of colonialism.    

The exhibition centers on the paintings of Clément Siatous, which memorializes the struggle and triumphs on the Chagosian people. In the early 1970s, the entire population of the Chagos Islands, a British colony located in the Indian Ocean, were forcibly evicted by the United Kingdom Government to make way for a U.S. naval base. In exhaustive detail, Siatous illustrates a chronicle of life on the islands, remembered and imagined, before and after eviction. His practice reveals a counter narrative to military record, articulating the importance of radical imagination and archiving in the creation of collective memory.  

While Siatous’s practice anchors the exhibition in the Chagos Islands, it also models an archiving process that is shared with other artists in Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Mauritius, Panamá, Puerto Rico, as well as their diasporas in the U.S. and the UK. Together , their work explores the shared historical experiences of colonialism, surveillance, and military interventions on displaced communities.

Virtual Link