Geoff Carr Photograph Collection, ca. mid-1980 to early 2000s
Held by The Filson Historical Society
Creator: Geoff Carr
Title: Geoff Carr Photograph Collection, ca. mid-1980 to early 2000s
Rights: For information regarding literary and copyright interest for these photographs, contact the Collections Department.
Size of Collection: 7 oversized boxes (60 items) and 553 digital files (5.43 GB)
Location Number: 023PC16
Scope and Content Note
Sixty matted and unmatted fine art, black-and-white portraiture documenting Louisville and Southern Indiana artists, by Louisville photographer Geoff Carr. Carr began photographing artists in their studios for the Kentucky Art and Craft Foundation– now the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft (KMAC)– in 1988 for artists to display alongside their work during exhibitions. Once the KMAC project was complete, he continued capturing regional artists in their personal creative spaces and studios. Also included are born-digital files of some of the artists; these items have the same identifier with a letter “a” after the object ID number.
Biographical Note
Geoffrey Carr (1953-) has been a commercial photographer for over thirty years in Louisville, Kentucky. He studied photography at the Center for Photographic Studies, earned his bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Louisville, and holds an MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois. He has won numerous awards on the local and national level for his photographs. Carr was a member and Director of the Pyro Gallery in Louisville. He opened a studio now called Firehouse Gallery at 221 S. Hancock St. in the early 2000s, where he displays his own photographic work as well as an array of work from other contemporary, regional artists.
Artist Biographies
Stephanie Baldyga-Stagg is a classically trained artist from Louisville, Kentucky. Her works often feature abstract strokes layered on top of each other, resulting in geometric shapes. She has taught art at Presentation Academy, Spalding University, and the University of Louisville.
Catherine Bryant is a Louisville landscape artist who prefers working “en plein air.” She formerly owned a gallery on Frankfort Avenue and now works at her gallery on Sherbrooke Road. She also teaches art at Preston Art Center and at her personal studio in Louisville.
Tom Butsch is a sculptor and metal artist in Louisville, Kentucky.
Madison Cawein (1950-) was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He attended Harvard University and the California Institute of the Arts. He is most well-known for his work as a painter of botanical subjects in a photo-realistic style.
Dionisio Ceballos (1972-) was born in Mexico City. He is a multidisciplinary artist known for his murals and colorful abstract work. He is an Emmy award winner for his work as an artist and an animator. He now works and lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
Cheryl Chapman is an abstract painter and collage artist who uses color and line as the dominant element in her works. She earned her MFA in Visual Art from the University of Kentucky.
Henry Chodkowski (1937-) was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He is best known for his landscape and seascape paintings that are inspired by a fascination with Greece, specifically the island of Crete and the Aegean Sea. He taught painting at the University of Louisville from 1962 to 1999. He now lives and works in Louisville.
Gloucester Caliman “G. C.” Coxe (1907-1999) was an abstract painter in the Louisville art scene. He was the first Black artist to receive a fine arts degree from the University of Louisville. He co-founded the Louisville Art Workshop and was a mentor to generations of Louisville artists. He made his living as an illustrator and a painter.
Mary Craik (1924-2019) was a fiber artist and feminist activist from Louisville, Kentucky. In her early life, she traveled around the country and internationally with her husband. She taught middle and high school art in Texas before getting her master’s degree. Her personal experience with sexism in the workplace lead to her pursing a PhD at the University of Iowa. After experiencing sexism once again, she filed a discrimination suit against the University and used the money from the settlement to establish the Mary Craik Scholarship for Women at the University of Louisville. Once moving back to Louisville in 1990, she began her career as a fiber artist.
Mary Ann Currier (1927-2017) started her art career as a commercial artist in the advertising department at Stewart’s Department Store. She experimented with many different styles of art but is ultimately known best for her hyper-realistic arrangements of commonplace items. Her work has been exhibited in 21 solo and 84 group shows across the United States, and she is featured in 19 permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Speed Art Museum.
Brad Devlin creates abstract, three-dimensional compositions from found and salvaged materials. He lives and creates in Louisville, Kentucky.
Patrick Donley is a sculptor, musician, and gallery owner in Louisville, Kentucky. He is most well-known for his colorful, abstract paintings. His current work involves excavating and photographing items found beneath his warehouse/studio, which sits atop a 19th-century midden.
William Duffy (1953-) went to school to pursue drawing and painting, and in his early career as an artist he primarily produced paintings, silk screen prints, and drawings that shared his personal experiences as an African American. He later discovered carving stone was his calling and started work full-time as a sculptor in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1980.
Gaela Erwin (1951-) was born in Franklin, Indiana. She is a contemporary painter of portraits using both pastel and oil mediums. Erwin is inspired by the rich history of portraiture and studies seventeenth-century portraits. She now works and creates in Louisville, Kentucky.
Wayne Ferguson is a ceramic artist who creates holloware items meant more for decoration than storage. Most of his creations can be deemed effigy pots in the shapes of people or animals, oftentimes touching upon political satire or commentary. He has worked with clay since age seven.
Paul Fields (1939-2004) was an internationally renowned Louisville sculptor of stone and wood abstracts. He was Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest’s first unofficial Artist in Residence in 1980.
Marvin Finn (1913-2007) grew up on a farm in Clio, Alabama. One of twelve children, he left school in the first grade to help work on the family farm. He grew up watching his father whittling wood into little toys and learned the art from him. He moved to Louisville after the outbreak of World War I, where he got married and had children of his own. He continued the tradition of creating toys from wood for his own children, and eventually went on to create larger displays of his whimsical farm animals.
Bates Fisher is a three-dimensional metal artist in Kentucky.
Sarah Frederick grew up in Louisville but left as a young woman to study art in California, where she fell in love with ceramic arts. She is most well known for her press-molded terracotta jars, teapots, plants, and bowls. She was a founding member of the Louisville Potters, a group of professional potters who gather to share events and support each other in their artistic endeavors.
Fred di Frenzi (1953-) is a glass artist and sculptor.
Julius Friedman (1943-2017) was one of the most influential photographers and graphic designers in the Louisville arts community. He is known for his iconic posters advertising the Louisville Ballet and Louisville Orchestra, and particularly recognized for his famous Louisville Ballet poster of a pointe shoe balanced on an egg. He was a cofounder of the design studio Images with Nathan Felde in Louisville in 1968, which focused on book and poster design.
Denise Furnish was born in Louisville, Kentucky. Her background is in quilt restoration, painting, surface design, and graphic design. She works with discarded quilts and paints into them. Alongside Joyce Garner, she opened Garner-Furnish Studio in 2003.
Joyce Garner is a self-taught painter from Covington, Kentucky, with a studio in Louisville. She is a large-format oil painter that uses bold colors and heavy details. Her paintings typically focus on the theme of family through time. Garner opened Garner-Furnish Studio with Denise Furnish in 2003. After that closed, she co-founded Garner Narrative in 2011 with her daughter, Angie Reed Garner.
Rhonda Goodall is a painter living in Louisville, Kentucky. She owns a gallery in the Crescent Hill neighborhood. Goodall’s paintings “span themes of flora, intuition, synchronicity, sense of place, humanity, and the astral.”
Albertus “Al” Gorman is a Louisville found-material artist and art advocate who uses objects that wash ashore from the Ohio River to create whimsical sculptures, stating he has a “love for the natural world which informs” the art he makes.
Susan Gorsen is a Louisville visual artist who creates vivid and colorful drawings, mainly using oil pastel crayons. Gorsen has been a long-time arts activist and served on the Louisville Mayor’s Committee for Public Art and Amenities, as well as served on the board of the Louisville Visual Arts Association. She created a youth arts program for children in the Louisville Public School system, that went on to travel to Belfast, Northern Ireland in 2000.
Ed Hamilton (1947-) is a sculptor in Louisville, Kentucky. He worked as an apprentice under notable sculptor, Barney Bright. Hamilton is very active in the Louisville arts community, teaching workshops, holding lectures, inviting other artists to work in his studio space, and participating in local art exhibitions. He has served on a variety of boards in the community and has several well-known sculptures around the city.
Rodney Hatfield, also known as Art Snake, grew up in an Appalachian-Kentucky working-class family. He is a self-taught artist. Starting as a musician, Hatfield “displays a freedom with media” on the canvas, combining different textures and ideas.
Billy Hertz was a pioneer gallery owner in Louisville, setting up his first exhibition at 632 East Market St. in 1991. He paints semi-abstract landscapes. He was the co-owner and director of Galerie Hertz in Louisville.
Shayne Hull is an award-winning Louisville-based painter and sculptor, known for portraits and more recently, his satirical political caricatures.
Stephen Irwin (1959-2010) is a native of Vine Grove, Kentucky, but has spent most of his adult life in Louisville. Most of his work was inspired by his own experiences as a lifelong heart patient in poor health. His art has been widely collected both regionally and internationally and has been exhibited around the world. He produced delicate etchings and drawings in his early career, but later focused on producing edgy and critical delicate works out of indelicate things.
Craig Kavier is a blacksmith living and working in Louisville, Kentucky. He creates forged iron and bronze sculptures, architectural elements, and furniture.
David Keator (1951-2016) was a Louisville-based artist who created mostly porcelain works, based on traditional vessel forms with intricately inscribed details. Once his arthritis made ceramic work difficult, he began painting. He also created furniture inspired by Art Deco.
Keith Kemble is an artist in Louisville, Kentucky.
Ray Kleinhelter is an artist out of New Albany, Indiana. He is most known for his abstract riverscapes that he painted from his boat studio while sailing up and down the Ohio River.
David Kocka (1950-) is a sculptor and former priest out of Laconia, Indiana. He “views the rituals of art, faith, and everyday life as inseparable.” His most notable work is perhaps his bronze, spiritual sculptures. He also writes poetry and is a painter.
Bruce Linn has explored multiple artistic disciplines throughout his life but is most well-known for his large-scale paintings visualizing mythical narratives and metaphoric images. He is a Louisville-based artist, but also has interests in music composition, writing, photography, and curating exhibitions.
Suzanne Mitchell is an artist and former art professor at the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville.
Jacque Parsley is a Louisville-based artist who uses found objects, artifacts, ephemera, and vintage printed matter to create her art.
Tom Pfannerstill is a fine artist and hyper-realist sculptor and painter who creates intricate depictions of everyday objects found on the street.
Joel Pinkerton is an artist in Louisville, Kentucky, that uses found material to create 3D sculptures, wall reliefs, and installations.
C.J. Pressma is a photographer working and living in Louisville, Kentucky. He has worked as a multimedia producer and marketing communications specialist. He is most well-known for his seven-part series, Witness to the Holocaust, one of the first productions to use survivor interviews to tell the story of the Holocaust. Pressma is primarily a digital printmaker and textile artist and was a founding member of PYRO Gallery in Louisville.
Chris Radtke is a textile artist in Louisville, Kentucky. She works with textile fabrics, creating three-dimensional pieces that “blur the boundaries between sculpture and drawing.”
Judy Riendeau is an artist and art teacher in the Louisville area. Her medium of choice is clay, but she has also worked with mixed media, such as wire and found objects.
Martin Rollins is a Louisville artist and art educator. He works mostly with oil pastels and related media and produces mostly urban and suburban cityscapes and landscapes. He is heavily inspired by the architecture and landscape of Louisville. Rollins received his BFA from the Louisville School of Art in 1981 and holds an MFA from the University of Cincinnati. He also works as a school-museum liaison in Louisville and as a consultant to Kentucky Educational Television/ Kentucky Department of Education’s Visual Arts Toolkit project.
Scott Scarboro is a multimedia artist from Louisville, KY now residing in New Albany, IN. His “Upcycle” sculpture, located on 4th and Broadway in Louisville is part of the Louisville Downtown District’s Public Art Bike Rack Program. Scarboro has exhibited at Louisville’s Speed Art Museum, SFMOMA, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Indianapolis and was featured during Art Basel Miami at the Aqua Art Hotel. Scott Scarboro is a non-folk artist who nonetheless has participated in folk art festivals, including four juried Finster Fests from 1999 to 2002 at the Rev. Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens in Georgia. He has given lectures and presentations at the Chicago Institute of Art, The Exploratorium in San Francisco and The Cyber Arts International Convention in Pasadena, California. He has a BFA from the University of Kentucky and an MFA from the San Francisco art Institute. His work can be found in private and corporate international collections. He’s been a schoolteacher, a lamp repairman and a prop builder for clowns at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Venice, Florida.
Robert Stagg is a still-life painter and art teacher in Louisville, Kentucky. He received his MA in Studio Art and Art History from the University of Louisville and holds an MFA from the University of Kentucky. Stagg has taught studio art and art history at Spalding University.
Ann Stewart-Anderson (1935-2019) was a painter who was active in Louisville, Kentucky. Her art focused on “the rituals of being a woman,” and was heavily feminist in nature.
Chuck Swanson is an artist living and working in Louisville, Kentucky. He operated Swanson Contemporary Gallery in the NuLu district of downtown from its opening in 1982 to its termination in 2019. He is known for his paintings and sculptures.
Julie Schweitzer is an artist and arts advocate in the regional arts community in New Albany, Indiana. She is now the Executive Director of ArtSeed, an organization that offers a variety of classes and programming, as well as community outreach opportunities to support local artists. Julie owns and runs Bourne-Schweitzer Gallery in New Albany.
Byron Temple (1933-2002) was a ceramicist from Centerville, Indiana. He apprenticed under Bernard Leach in Cornwall, England, in 1960. After traveling and teaching internationally, he moved to Kentucky in 1986, where he settled and focused on making unique art pottery.
Caroline Waite was trained as a printmaker but has also worked with textiles and three-dimensional objects. She is inspired by the relationship between objects and enjoys developing a narrative between them. She has taught several art and design courses in the United Kingdom, where she is originally from. She now lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky.
Dane Waters is a singer, performer, and composer in Louisville, Kentucky. She makes music and composes with different ensembles and collaborates with and performs with other Louisville groups or musicians. She grew up surrounded by music- her mother was an opera singer with the Kentucky Opera. Waters went on to study opera like her mother.
John Whitesell was born in Hamilton, Ohio. He is currently a printmaker and educator living and working in Floyds Knobs, Indiana. He experimented in many different printing mediums, namely lithography, woodblock printing, and silkscreen printing.
Marilyn Whitsell is a master printmaker who also works in photography and graphic design. Additionally, she creates jewelry pieces inspired by nature and other cultures.
Collections List
Box 1:
023PC16.01-01a: Stephanie Baldyga-Stagg, 2004
023PC16.02-02a: Catherine Bryant, 2005
023PC16.03-03a: Tom Butsch, 1987
023PC16.04: Madison Cawein, 1998
023PC16.05-05a: Dionisio Ceballos
023PC16.06-06a: Cheryl Chapman
023PC16.07-07a: Henry Chokowski, 2005
023PC16.08-08a: G. C. Coxe, 1997
Box 2:
023PC16.09-09a: Mary Craik, 2004
023PC16.10-10a: Mary Ann Currier, 1998
023PC16.11-11a: Brad Devlin, 2004
023PC16.12-12a Patrick Donley, 2006
023PC16.13: William Duffy, 1988
023PC16.14-14a Gaela Erwin, 2008
023PC16.15- Paul Fields, 1986
023PC16.16-16a: Marvin Finn, 1988
023PC16.17- Bates Fisher, 1997
Box 3:
023PC16.18-18a: Sarah Frederick, 1996
023PC16.19- Fred di Frenzi, 1987,
023PC16.20-20a: Julius Friedman
023PC16.21-21a: Denise Furnish, 2004
023PC16.22-22a: Joyce Garner, 2005
023PC16.23-23a: Rhonda Goodall
023PC16.24-24a: Albertus Gorman
023PC16.25-25a: Ed Hamilton, 1986
023PC16.26: Ed Hamilton
Box 4:
023PC16.27- Rodney Hatfield as “Art Snake,” 1998 / 2003
023PC16.28- Rodney Hatfield, 2004
023PC16.29-29a: Rodney Hatfield, 2006
023PC16.30-30a: Billy Hertz, 2004
023PC16.31-31a: Shayne Hull, 1998
023PC16.32-32a: Stephen Irwin, 2008
023PC16.33- Craig Kavier, 1998
Box 5:
023PC16.34: David Keator, 1988
023PC16.35: Keith Kemble, 1998
023PC16.36-36a: Ray Kleinhelter
023PC16.37: David Kocka, 1987
023PC16.38-38a: Bruce Linn, 2006
023PC16.39-39a: Suzanne Mitchell, 2004
023PC16.40-40a: Jacque Parsley, 1996
023PC16.41: Tom Pfannerstill, 1986
Box 6:
023PC16.42-42a: Joel Pinkerton
023PC16.43-43a: C. J. Pressma, 2004
023PC16.44-44a: Chris Radtke, 2008
023PC16.45-45a: Judy Riendeau, 2004
023PC16.46-46a: Martin Rollins, 2004
023PC16.47-47a: Scott Scarboro, 2005
023PC16.48-48a: Robert Stagg, 2004
Box 7:
023PC16.49-49a: Ann Stewart-Anderson
023PC16.50-50a: Chuck Swanson
023PC16.51: Julie Schweitzer
023PC16.52-52a: Byron Temple
023PC16.53: Byron Temple
023PC16.54-54a: Caroline Waite
023PC16.55-55a: Dane Waters
023PC16.56-56a: John Whitesell
023PC16.57-57a: Wayne Ferguson
023PC16.58-58a: Ray Kleinhelther
023PC16.59-59a: Susan Gorsen, 2004
023PC16.60-60a: Marilyn Whitesell, 2005
Digital Only
023PC16.61a: Tish (Letitia) Quesenberry
023PC16.62a: Cheryl Chapman, 2004
023PC16.63a: Julius Friedman, 2004
Subject Headings
Artists—20th century—Portraits.
Artists—21st century—Portraits.
