Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana (1928-2018) was one of the most iconic American artists of the twentieth century, whose distinctive fusion of hard-edge geometric abstraction, text, and Pop imagery produced some of the most instantly recognizable images in modern art. Born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, he was adopted at birth and grew up in the state whose name he would later adopt as his own artistic identity. He pursued his early training at the John Herron Art Institute and served in the United States Air Force before continuing his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School, and the Edinburgh College of Art on a scholarship abroad.

Indiana moved to New York City in 1954 and settled in the Coenties Slip neighborhood of lower Manhattan, where he lived among an extraordinary community of artists that included Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Jack Youngerman, and James Rosenquist. His romantic and creative relationship with Kelly proved particularly important to his artistic development, and the Coenties Slip years shaped much of his mature vision. He emerged as a leading voice of American Pop Art in the early 1960s, developing a distinctive vocabulary of stenciled letters, numbers, and hard-edge geometric compositions drawn from American commercial signage, highways, and vernacular graphics.

Indiana is best known worldwide for his celebrated LOVE image, first created for a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card in 1965 and later translated into stamps, prints, paintings, and monumental sculptures installed in cities around the globe. His HOPE image, produced in 2008, became closely associated with the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. In the latter part of his life Indiana moved to Vinalhaven Island in Maine, where he lived a famously reclusive existence. His works are held in every major American museum, and his images continue to circulate through popular culture with an ubiquity few artists have ever achieved.