(Jan. 16, 1928– Nov. 7, 2018). Lois Main Templeton was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and later lived in San Francisco in the 1970s, where she became immersed in the Bay Area jazz and art scene.
In 1979, she relocated to Indianapolis with her husband Kenneth Stuart Templeton Jr. Templeton enrolled at and excelled as a student, graduating magna cum laude in 1981 at the age of 51.
Not satisfied to retreat to the solitude of a home studio, Templeton searched out a downtown warehouse building for studio space—the Faris Building. As others followed her lead, she became a driving force behind the revitalization of the downtown Indy arts scene.
Best-known for her large, colorful, and painterly abstract paintings, Templeton was also a writer of poetry and journals. As her work evolved, her signature style combined vigorous mark-making with excerpts from her writings. She meticulously recorded activities, exhibits, and personal correspondences in sketchbooks daily for decades. She was fully immersed in her community and passionate about social issues, particularly childhood literacy.
Templeton was a founding member of Very Special Arts (VSA) Indiana (later ArtMix), an organization that creates learning opportunities through the arts for individuals with disabilities.
Over her lifetime, she engaged people at all levels—she opened her studio to K-12 students, served as an art instructor for college-aged students, and taught art to prison inmates.
Among her many honors she received: the Herron School of Art and Design Distinguished Alumni of the Year in 2013, the Cultural Vision Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, a 2001 Creative Renewal Arts Fellowship from the , an Artists Project Award from the in 2000, and she was selected to create the 1997 Indiana Governor’s Arts Award. The featured a retrospective exhibit of her work in spring and summer 2018.
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