Painters carrying blank canvases will fan out across the hills and gardens of the T.C. Steele State Historic Site on Saturday, September 12, for the 38th annual Great Outdoor Art Contest, Indiana's oldest plein air painting competition. Artists begin arriving at 7 a.m. and will work outdoors until 4 p.m., giving spectators a rare chance to watch the creative process unfold on the very grounds where T.C. Steele himself once painted Brown County's hills, woods, and changing seasons.
The contest, held at the historic site near Nashville, is part of the larger Brown County Art Colony Weekend running September 11 through 13, according to The Republic. Artists may register online at indianamuseum.org through the day of the event, with day-of registration accepted until 11 a.m. Adult registration costs $20, while youth registration is $15. The contest is co-sponsored by the Indiana Plein Air Painters Association and draws competitors from across Indiana, all working throughout the property's grounds and gardens before having their canvases stamped ahead of choosing a painting location.
Judging, Awards, and a Storied Judge
Judging begins at 2 p.m., led by artist C.W. Mundy, with awards announced at 3 p.m. Mundy holds Master Status with the American Impressionist Society and Master Signature Membership with Oil Painters of America, and before turning to plein air painting in the early 1990s, he spent over a decade as a sports illustrator and official artist for Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight, according to the Salmagundi Club.
Spectator admission to watch the contest runs $5 per person, separate from general historic site admission, which costs $12 for adults, $10 for seniors, and $7 for youth ages 3 to 17, per the same report. That broader admission includes access to the House of the Singing Winds, Steele's hilltop residence, and his Large Studio, where visitors can purchase lunch in the visitor center between stops.
A Studio Frozen in Steele's Final Years
Inside the Large Studio, a special display recognizes the 100th anniversary of Steele's death, featuring rarely seen artworks alongside condolence letters sent to his wife, Selma Neubacher Steele, after his passing. The T.C. Steele State Historic Site's centennial exhibit gathers nearly 30 career-spanning works, including a newly acquired portrait of Steele's daughter Daisy completed shortly after his first wife's death, displayed beside those historic letters, according to the Indiana State Museum. The exhibition launched a year-long celebration marking Steele's death on July 24, 1926.
Steele and his wife made their home in Brown County beginning in the early 1900s, and the couple's hilltop residence, built in 1907, earned the nickname House of the Singing Winds for the ridge breezes that swept through its screened porches. The property was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, according to Wikipedia's entry on the T.C. Steele State Historic Site, and Steele's move there made him the first major artist to settle permanently in Brown County.
From Selma Steele's Gift to a State Nature Preserve
Shortly before her death in 1945, Selma Neubacher Steele donated the 211-acre hilltop estate to the state of Indiana, including the home, studio, original furnishings, and more than 300 original paintings, transforming the private property into what is now the T.C. Steele State Historic Site. Selma Steele also sculpted the formal gardens on the grounds out of clay, and those gardens are now officially recognized by the Historic Iris Preservation Society as one of only three display gardens in Indiana holding that status, according to Friends of T.C. Steele. A 92-acre portion of the estate was later dedicated in 1990 as the Selma N. Steele State Nature Preserve, protecting rare and endangered native plant species across its ridges and ravines and encompassing woodland hiking trails that Selma Steele herself mapped out.
Steele became known for his outdoor landscapes and helped establish the plein air painting tradition that still defines Brown County's art scene today. He was the premier figure of the Hoosier Group of Impressionist painters, alongside J. Ottis Adams, William Forsyth, Richard Buckner Gruelle, and Otto Stark, who studied together at Munich's Royal Academy before returning to paint Midwestern landscapes and gaining national acclaim following an influential 1894 exhibition in Chicago, per the Indiana Historical Society.
A Statewide Centennial Beyond Nashville
This year's contest lands amid a coordinated statewide push to mark Steele's centennial. The Brown County Art Gallery in Nashville opened a centennial exhibition in July, marking both 100 years since Steele's death and 100 years since the gallery's artists association was founded shortly after his passing, as reported by the Seymour Tribune. Indiana University also opened Capturing the Campus: T.C. Steele at University Collections at McCalla in April, showcasing campus depictions and presidential portraits Steele painted while serving as IU's inaugural artist-in-residence from 1922 until 1926, according to the Indiana Daily Student.
Farther north, the Haan Museum of Indiana Art in Lafayette launched Chasing the Light: Inside the Luminous World of T.C. Steele on August 27, running through the end of the year with more than 30 oil paintings tracing his career from 1880s Munich studies to his Brown County period, the Brown County Democrat reports. Hoodline previously covered how Steele's move to Brown County sparked the creation of the Brown County Art Colony and led to the founding of the historic site, in its report on local artists in the Hoosier Art Salon. Together, the exhibitions and Saturday's contest offer visitors a full picture of why the hilltop Steele once called home remains central to Indiana's art history a century after his death.
