Steve Mannheimer

 The first quarter century of Steve Mannheimer‘s career followed the traditional arc of an American academic artist. A graduate degree in painting from Washington University led in 1976 to a teaching job at the Herron School of Art and Design, part of IUPUI, the Indianapolis campus of Indiana University. In 1982, while keeping his tenured job, Mannheimer became a weekly visual arts columnist for The Indianapolis Star (back when midwestern newspaper columnists were fat frogs in small ponds). 

From 1992-2000, he also served as president of the Mid-America College Art Association and managed public art projects. Not surprisingly, his exhibition record during these decades was modest. In 2000 he left the university to work in technology business development for Thomson multimedia, SA, better known in America as RCA, despite knowing nothing about technology or business. 

In 2002 the university offered him a position in the new School of Informatics and Computing. So began a second 20-year chapter in his academic career, this time teaching concept development and, to complete the 180-degree professional turn, researching audio and tactile cognition with blind students in Indiana and in India.

 In 2015, freshly divorced and suddenly living in an 90-year-old apartment with acres of wall space, Mannheimer began exploring this entire oxymoronic collage of ideas, feelings and questions about why and how patterns and colors simultaneously clash and coalesce to make sense, maybe, within an irregular and improvised space on the wall. In these works, composition is mostly a matter of felicitous happenstance, a coincidence of plaids chosen with the lights out. The works on this website were created during 2019-21. In 2021, Mannheimer was selected for the Midwest edition of New American Painting.