DOCSLIB.ORG

Robert Indiana

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Robert Indiana • Robert Indiana was a major figure in Pop Art, that most American art form, developing his distinctive “hard-edged” style that he has worked in for over 50 Robert years. One of his images alone, the LOVE icon, will Indiana ensure his renown forever. AMERICAN ARTIST • He wasn’t born “Robert Indiana,” but he was born in 1928 - Indiana, and changed his last name from “Clark” when he was in his teens (to make it more interesting). He had a crazy childhood, his family continually on the move. He claimed to have lived in 21 houses before he graduated high school. His parents divorced when he was 10, and he spent many years bouncing between their households. Finally in the last few years of high school, he took the reins and moved to Indianapolis to attend an arts-based high school. He did very well there, but then took three years out of his art study to serve in the US Air Force. • One interesting feature of his early life was that in several different places he lived or was stationed, he started or ran a newspaper. Writing and words were always very important to him. • After his military service, he attended several different art schools, including the famous Art Institute of Chicago, and also spent some time in Europe. • He ultimately moved to New York City because that was the center of the American art world in the mid-1950s. Things were rough for a while, as he worked in an art supply store to make ends meet, but he made friends with the abstract Robert Indiana‘s studio at the New York City piers (with cat!) and some of his early sculptures, called herms. artist Ellsworth Kelly, who invited him to live with other artists in some abandoned warehouses on the East River. • It was here that Indiana created his first major pieces, sculptures made from industrial materials and old planks he found in the lofts. He called these “herms,” after the pillars that held road signs in ancient Greece. He also found some brass stencils that he incorporated into his pieces, establishing the importance of numbers, words and typography to his work. • Robert Indiana’s works can look very simple and yet hard to understand, but he was always ready to help. He said once, “Most of my work is very autobiographical in one way or another.” Through various writings and interviews, he was happy to explain why he used the words and symbols he did. Sometimes he used just strong three-letter words to send a message, while other times he created pieces that The Calumet, 1961 HUG, 1962 were more complex. • For instance, the word calumet, the title of one painting, has several meanings. It’s a small town in Indiana, and it’s also a word for a Native American ceremonial pipe. He said that this painting is “about heroes,” or those Indian tribes that once had dignity and met like modern nations do. The words on the outer circle are from the famous poem The Song of Hiawatha. Around the stars are names of Indian tribes that gathered to meet. Indiana felt this painting depicted a “great tragedy,” the Native Americans’ loss of their culture. • The painting HUG looks very simple, but maybe it’s not quite. It’s a warm and fuzzy word depicted in stark, black, mechanical stencils. Also, maybe there’s a little sadness that the word doesn’t fill the whole canvas, but instead hovers above what he called a “vacant rectangle,” where there is no hug to be found. • Robert Indiana had some luck in his timing and in his artist friends. When he arrived, many people were tiring of the pure abstraction of artists like Jackson Pollock. Indiana and his Pop Art friends were young people making fresh art, in a world that’s always looking for something new. The Pop artists embraced modern American life, using what they saw around them – from the movies, advertising, highway signs, comic books, and everyday objects. They most often used American Dream I, 1961 The Eateria, 1962 bright colors and strong, hard-edged images. For Robert Indiana, Pop art was by definition “American.” • After only a few years of perfecting his style, one of this works, The American Dream I, was purchased for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This painting has it all to be classic Robert Indiana -- stars, circles, stenciled short words, bright colors, numbers -- and most of them have personal significance to him. The numbers top left are highways he often traveled. “TILT” comes from the pinball games he found in the many roadside cafes he visited with is parents. “TAKE ALL” is a reference to an American’s push to be a winner. And the khaki green, plus the stars, probably have some reference to his Air Force days. • Along with HUG and DIE, the word EAT is one that comes up again and again. It refers to the diners his mother worked in, which often had a big neon “EAT” sign over them. Plus you have to eat to live! And you have those numbers again, this time arrayed like on a gaming table. Spin the wheel! Charles Demuth‘s I Saw the Figure 5 • This work has an interesting history, based on an earlier in Gold, 1928 ▶ painting Indiana admired that was created in 1928, the year of his birth, which he found significant. That year, the artist Charles Demuth was inspired by a poem that his friend William Carlos Williams had written on the spur of the moment, when a fire engine “Number 5” went clanging past in the New York streets: Among the rain / and lights / I saw ◀ Robert Indiana‘s The Figure 5, 1963 the figure 5 / in gold / on a red / fire truck / moving / tense / unheeded / to gong clangs / siren howls / and wheels rumbling / through the dark city. • Robert Indiana loved this story and this painting from 35 years earlier, in some ways similar to his own. He kept the series of number 5’s but changed the background to suit his style, using his favorite three-letter words to complete it. • As with many of his works, Indiana painted several variations of The Figure 5. Very soon he was to turn to screenprinting in order to more easily make “multiples” of his art. He was good friends with Andy Warhol, who is famous for his screenprints. Unlike Warhol, who purposefully made his prints off-kilter and obviously handmade, Indiana wanted his prints to look as “machine- made” as possible. • Not all artists have a political side, but Robert Indiana did. He heard the news coming out of segregated Southern states, where black people were not respected or given their rights, and was horrified. He decided to express his outrage in a series of paintings. He originally intended to depict all the states that had left the Union in the Civil War but he ended up just doing four. Alabama, 1965 Mississippi, 1965 • On each is written, “Just as in the anatomy of man, every nation must have its hind part” (his words). The stars are the “stain of the Confederate flag.” The cities named were places where very bad things had happened to African Americans who were trying to make things better. He felt that his hard-edged style was a good way to depict people uninterested in change. • Around this time, he moved from the waterfront lofts to more comfortable space in a better neighborhood of Manhattan. He also began spending a lot of time in Vinalhaven, Maine, a tiny island town where one of his friends lived. He rented an old building named the “Star of Hope.” Given how much he had used stars in his art, he thought this was fate for sure! (He has lived there full-time since 1978.) • Here is the famous LOVE icon. This design, with the tilted “O,” wasn’t more special than his others until MoMA asked him to submit a design for their 1965 Christmas card. He gave it to them in many different color combinations, like those on the bottom right, and they chose the red, blue and green, probably because it the was most Christmassy and was very bright. The design became an instant classic, at least partly because the late 1960s was a time when many people were hoping to bring more love and less war into the world. All of a sudden, Robert Indiana became a household name. • In later years, he revealed more details about why the image is so personal to him. The red, blue and green was his favorite colorway, he said, because it reminded him of his father who died that year. All during Robert’s childhood, his father worked for the Phillips 66 oil company, whose gas stations had a green and red circular sign with a big 66 on it. Robert Indiana said he was reminded of looking up at the Phillips sign with a background of Indiana blue sky. • The LOVE stamp was issued in 1973, the first of their now regular series of “love” stamps that appear each February. • As we’ve said, Indiana made many series of paintings, sometimes variations on a design, sometimes on a theme. One ambitious project was to make a personal print for each year of the 1960s (and he went on to do the 1970s, too). On the left is his 1961. He said in an interview, “This painting celebrates the year 1961. I had my studio in South Ferry.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Preliminary Experience Create a Journal from an Altered Book
    IINTRODUCTIONNTRODUCTION Photo caption. Photo caption. Preliminary Experience Create a Journal from an Altered Book OBJECTIVES A TEACHING GUIDE FOR GRADE 4 AArtrtrtSmaSSmart:mart:t: Indiana INDIANA’S VISUAL ARTS AND ARTISTS The fi rst ArtSmart: Indiana was a major educational and public program of the Greater Lafayette Art Museum (now the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette), created to meet the goal of improving visual literacy, museum education skills, and awareness of the development of art in Indiana. The original program, (1986) written by Susan O. Chavers, and implemented by Sharon Smith Theobald, was a nontraditional multidisciplinary approach that was well received by Hoosier teachers who included ArtSmart: Indiana in their curricular plans. A copy of the ArtSmart: Indiana 200 page Resource Guide was sent to every library throughout Indiana, with the support of Pam Bennett at the Indiana Historical Bureau. The current revision of ArtSmart: Indiana, as a web-based initiative, is a Partnership Education Program of the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette and The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Special appreciation is extended to Dr. Jeffrey Patchen, President and CEO, and Mary Fortney, Educational Resource Development Manager, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. The updated ArtSmart: Indiana project was funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services with additional support from the McAllister Foundation to launch the McAllister Art Smart: Indiana Technology Center. Also, Randolph Deer, Indianapolis, and The North Central Health Services helped underwrite the additional printings of the The Art Smart: Indiana Resource Catalog and The Teaching Guide. Please visit our website, www.artsmartindiana.org.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Indiana
    ROBERT INDIANA Born in New Castle, Indiana in 1928 and died in 2018 Robert Indiana adopted the name of his home state after serving in the US military. The artist received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954 and following the advice of his friend Ellsworth Kelly, he relocated to New York, setting up a studio in the Coenties Slip neighborhood of Lower Manhattan and joined the pop art movement. The work of the American Pop artist Robert Indiana is rooted in the visual idiom of twentieth-century American life with the same degree of importance and influence as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. As a self-proclaimed “American painter of signs” Indiana gained international renown in the early 1960’s, he drew inspiration from the American road and shop signs, billboards, and commercial logos and combined it with a sophisticated formal and conceptual approach that turned a familiar vocabulary into something entirely new, his artworks often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words like “EAT”, “HOPE”, and “LOVE” what Indiana called “sculptural poems”. The iconic work “LOVE”, served as a print image for the Museum of Modern Art ‘s Christmas card in 1964 and sooner later the design became popular as US postage stamp. “LOVE” has also appeared in prints, paintings, sculptures, banners, rings, tapestries. Full of erotic, religious, autobiographical, and political undertones — it was co-opted as an emblem of 1960s idealism (the hippie free love movement). Its original rendering in sculpture was made in 1970 and is displayed in Indiana at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
    [Show full text]
  • American Legends: from Calder to O'keeffe
    AMERICAN LEGENDS: FROM CALDER TO O’KEEFFE TEACHER GUIDE WHITNEY December 2013–October 2014 ABOUT THIS TEACHER GUIDE How can these materials be used? These materials provide a framework for preparing you and your students for a visit to the exhibition and offer suggestions for follow up classroom reflection and lessons. The discussions and activities introduce some of the exhibition’s key themes and concepts. p. 4 About the Exhibition pp. 5-10 Pre- & Post-visit Activities pp. 11-27 Images & Information pp. 28-29 Bibliography & Links Which grade levels are these materials intended for? These lessons and activities have been written for Elementary, Middle, or High School students. We encourage you to adapt and build upon them in order to meet your teaching objectives and students’ needs. Learning standards The projects and activities in these curriculum materials address national and state learning standards for the arts, English language arts, social studies, and technology. The Partnership for Twenty-first Century Learning Skills http://www.p21.org/ Common Core State Standards http://www.corestandards.org/ Links to National Learning Standards http://www.mcrel.org/compendium/browse.asp Comprehensive guide to National Learning Standards by content area http://www.education-world.com/standards/national/index.shtml New York State P-12 Common Core Learning Standards http://www.engageny.org/resource/new-york-state-p-12-common-core-learning-standards New York City Department of Education’s Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts http://schools.nyc.gov/offices/teachlearn/arts/blueprint.html Feedback Please let us know what you think of these materials.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Indiana: Beyond Love
    WHITNEY ROBERT INDIANA: BEYOND LOVE TEACHER GUIDE September 26, 2013–January 5, 2014 ABOUT THIS TEACHER GUIDE How can these materials be used? These materials provide a framework for preparing you and your students for a visit to the exhibition and offer suggestions for follow up classroom reflection and lessons. The discussions and activities introduce some of the exhibition’s key themes and concepts. p. 4 About the Exhibition pp. 5-9 Pre- & Post-visit Activities pp. 10-20 Images and Related Information p. 21 Bibliography & Links Which grade levels are these materials intended for? These lessons and activities have been written for Elementary, Middle, or High School students. We encourage you to adapt and build upon them in order to meet your teaching objectives and students’ needs. Learning standards The projects and activities in these curriculum materials address national and state learning standards for the arts, English language arts, social studies, and technology. The Partnership for Twenty-first Century Learning Skills http://www.p21.org/ Common Core State Standards http://www.corestandards.org/ Links to National Learning Standards http://www.mcrel.org/compendium/browse.asp Comprehensive guide to National Learning Standards by content area http://www.education-world.com/standards/national/index.shtml New York State P-12 Common Core Learning Standards http://www.engageny.org/resource/new-york-state-p-12-common-core-learning-standards New York City Department of Education’s Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts http://schools.nyc.gov/offices/teachlearn/arts/blueprint.html Feedback Please let us know what you think of these materials.
    [Show full text]
  • Ben Franklin Parkway and Independence Mall Patch Programs
    Ben Franklin Parkway and Independence Mall Patch Programs 1 Independence Mall Patch Program Introduction – Philadelphia’s History William Penn, a wealthy Quaker from London earned most of his income from land he owned in England and Ireland. He rented the land for use as farmland even though he could have made much more money renting it for commercial purposes. He considered the rent he collected from the farms to be less corrupt than commercial wealth. He wanted to build such a city made up of farmland in Pennsylvania. As soon as William Penn received charter for Pennsylvania, Penn began to work on his dream by advertising that he would establish, “ A large Towne or City” on the Delaware River. Remembering the bubonic plague in London (1665) and the disastrous fire of 1666, Penn wanted, “ A Greene county Towne, which would never be burnt, and always be wholesome.” In 1681, William Penn announced he would layout a “Large Towne or City in the most convenient place upon the river for health and navigation.” Penn set aside 10,000 acres of land for the Greene townie on the Delaware and he stretched the town to reach the Schuylkill so that the city would face both rivers. He acquired one mile of river frontage on the Schuylkill parallel to those on the Delaware. Thus Philadelphia became a rectangle 1200 acres, stretching 2 miles in the length from east to west between the 3 rivers and 1 mile in the width North and South. William Penn hoped to create a peaceful city. When he arrived in 1682, he made a Great Treaty of Friendship with the Lenni Lenape Indians on the Delaware.
    [Show full text]
  • Messaging: Text and Visual Art
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications Sheldon Museum of Art 2011 Messaging: Text and Visual Art Sarah Feit Curatorial Assistant, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska- Lincoln Jorge Daniel Veneciano Director at Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska- Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs Part of the Art and Design Commons Feit, Sarah and Veneciano, Jorge Daniel, "Messaging: Text and Visual Art" (2011). Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications. 45. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs/45 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Sheldon Museum of Art at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. • Mary Corita Kent, Wat.nne'on, 1965, serigraph, 18 x 23 112", UNL F.M. Hall Collection, Courtesy of the CoritaArt Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles 24th Annual Sheldon Statewide Exhibition, 20 I 0-20 I I Sheldon Museum of Art • University of Nebraska-Lincoln Messaging: Text and Visual Art explores the use of In the decades leading up to the I960s, artistic language in art. Text in art mirrors the language practices took a defiant stance toward mass of our daily lives, drawing on newspapers, culture or kitsch. During the I 940s, Abstract advertisements, and personal stories. This Expressionism turned away from popular culture. exhibition focuses on how artists since the 1960s In his 1940 essay "Towards a Newer Laocoon," have used text in their work The term "messaging" art historian Clement Greenberg argued for the in the title evokes changes in communications that separation of painting from mass culture or kitsch have occurred in recent years.
    [Show full text]
  • A New Monumental Sculpture to Join LOVE in IMA Galleries Fletcher Benton Sculpture Will Permanently Go on View Next Month
    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. A new monumental sculpture to join LOVE in IMA Galleries Fletcher Benton sculpture will permanently go on view next month INDIANAPOLIS, Feb. 6, 2020—The Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields is pleased to announce the addition of a monumental abstract sculpture to its contemporary collection, Fletcher Benton’s (1931-2019) Folded Circle Dynamic Rhythms Red Phase III (1973). The monumental sculpture will be a permanent addition to the Pulliam Family Great Hall, framed by Robert Irwin’s Light and Space III (2008). Benton’s dynamic sculpture is constructed from two, red-painted aluminum half-circles placed perpendicularly to each other, with a polished stainless steel band around the edges. A vertical, kinetic element features colored acrylic panels that move back and forth, creating rhythmic, color changes. An abstract homage to the ancient Greek sculptor Polykleitos, the shape and scale of the work calls attention to the importance of spatial orientation and our understanding of form, which was a common theme of sculpture made in the 1960s. “Folded Circle Dynamic Rhythms Red Phase III is a major work that will make a striking addition to the atrium. This piece will strengthen the IMA’s rich holdings of late modernist sculpture and provide a thoughtful juxtaposition with other works in the contemporary collection,” said Dr. Michael Vetter, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at Newfields. “We are delighted to have this important irrevocable promised gift from Jon and Molly Ott and grateful to the Alliance of Newfields and Randy and Sheila Ott for their support of the work’s conservation.” Benton is best known for his mechanized sculptures made in the 1960s and early 1970s, which are all central works in the history of kinetic art.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Indiana
    ROBERT INDIANA BIOGRAPHY 1928 Born in Newcastle, Indiana 1929 Moves to the capital of Indiana, Indianapolis, centre of the thriving automotive industry. The automobile is a focus of his family’s life Beginning of the Great Depression 1935 Starts school at the age of seven in Moorseville where his intention to become an artist is greatly encouraged by a sympathetic teacher, Miss Ruth Coffman 1936 First trip to Texas to visit the Centennial Exposition at Fort Worth 1942 Leaves his mother’s home to return to Indianapolis and live with his remarried father in order to attend Arsenal Technical School. Works after school at Western Union and the Indianapolis Star but continues painting and holds a solo show of watercolors Words play the central role in the most elaborate and time-consuming project of his high school days; an illuminated transcription in the medieval style of the Second Chapter of Luke in Latin which he gives to the Arsenal Technical School upon graduation and is still regularly displayed there 1945 Attends Saturday scholarship classes at the John Herron Art Institute and takes instruction in semi-nude drawing under Edwin Fulwider 1946 Receives a scholarship to the John Herron Art Institute A second trip to Texas, this time to San Antonio 1948 While stationed nearby in Rome, New York, attends evening classes at Syracuse University and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica where he comes into his first contact with an instructor oriented to an international viewpoint – Oscar Weissbuch Visits New York City for the first time 1949 During the last year of his service edits the Sourdough Sentinel in Anchorage, Alaska, from which he returns home to Columbus, Indiana, on emergency leave for the death of his mother Attends the School of The Art Institute of Chicago for four years under the GI Bill of Rights, majoring in painting and graphics.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Indiana: a Sculpture Retrospective June 16–September 23, 2018 1905 Building, South Galleries and Sculpture Court
    Robert Indiana: A Sculpture Retrospective June 16–September 23, 2018 1905 Building, South Galleries and Sculpture Court This exhibition explores the more than five-decade career of one of America’s most beloved artists, Robert Indiana (American, 1928–2018). A selective survey of Indiana’s sculpture, it also includes numerous paintings, prints, and drawings, highlighting how Indiana’s thinking in visual form crossed different media. This quintessentially American artist returned to frequently autobiographical motifs, symbols, and imagery often after many decades of quiet reflection and rumination, building a corpus of work that ever more meaningfully reflected what it meant to be an American artist—and what it meant to be Robert Indiana—as the years passed. While LOVE will likely always remain the artist’s greatest contribution in the public imagination, his work beyond and apart from this memorable image places Indiana among the great American artists of the second half of the twentieth century. This exhibition introduces lesser-known late works—the Vinalhaven Woods, bronze editions of sculptures from different eras in his career, and the marble LOVEs—to make the case for the breadth and import of Indiana’s achievement. *** Zenith, 1960 Gesso and iron on wood panel Private Collection This small construction is among Indiana’s earliest sculptural works and introduces many elements of his later practice, including the prominent use of white gesso and the incorporation of rusted metal found objects. The circle and diamond shapes also find echoes in Indiana’s later work. Soul, 1960 Gesso, oil, and iron on wood with iron-and- wooden wheels Private Collection Indiana was raised in the Christian Science faith, and although he was not exceptionally religious, many ideas introduced there—for example, the circle as a symbol of eternity or the integral relationship between love and God—found their way into works, including Soul, through the decades.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert INDIANA (B
    Robert INDIANA (b. 1928) Education 1945 Herron School of Art, Indianapolis 1947 Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, New York 1949 - 1953 School of the Art Institute of Chicago 1954 Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art Selected Solo Exhibitions 2014 Robert Indiana’s Hartley Elegies, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX, USA Robert Indiana: The Mother of us All, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX, USA ‘Celebrating Love!’, Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, USA ‘The Essential Robert Indiana’, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, USA ‘Liebe’, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany 2013 ‘Indiana by the Numbers’, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana ‘The Monumental Woods’, Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich, Switzerland ‘Robert Indiana: Decade Autoportrait’, de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong ‘Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York ‘Signs from the Sixties: Robert Indiana’s Decade’, Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire 2012 ‘Robert Indiana: Sculptures’, Waddington Custot Galleries, London, England 2011 ‘Robert Indiana – Rare Works from 1959 on Coenties Slip’, Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich, Switzerland 2009 Robert Indiana and the Star of Hope - Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME ‘Robert Indiana’, Galerie Boisseree, Cologne, Germany ‘From LOVE to AMOR’, Galleria Farsetti Arte, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy 2008 ‘Robert Indiana a Milano’, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy ‘Robert Indiana: Hard Edge’, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York 2007 ‘Por Amor Al Arte’, Gran Via Marques del Turia, Valencia, Spain
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Indiana
    ROBERT INDIANA Biographical Information 1928 Born in New Castle, Indiana 1953–54 B.F.A., Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois 1954 Attended Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland, on the George Brown Travelling Fellowship 1964 Appeared in the Andy Warhol film Eat 1970 Received Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Franklin and Marshall College; Lancaster, Pennsylvania 1973 Designed LOVE on a United States postage stamp 1977 Awarded honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts by the University of Indiana in Bloomington 1981 Received honorary doctoral degree from Colby College in Waterville, Massachusetts Selected Exhibitions 2013 “Robert Indiana from A to Z;” Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute; Utica, New York “Robert Indiana: Beyond Love,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York “Voices of HOPE: Celebrating Robert Indiana;” Rosenbaum Contemporary; Boca Raton, Florida “Pop Art Accrochage;” Fluegel_Roncak Gallery; Nuremberg, Germany “All You Need is LOVE;” Mori Art Museum; Tokyo, Japan “The Pop Object: The Still Life Tradition in Pop Art,” Acquavella Galleries, Inc., New York “Now Here is also Nowhere: Part II;” Henry Art Gallery; Seattle, Washington 150 Yamato Road • Boca Raton, FL 33431 T: 561.994.9180 • www.rosenbaumcontemporary.com Selected Exhibitions (continued) 2012 “HOPE;” Contini Galleria d’Arte; Venice, Italy “Robert Indiana: Sculptures;” Waddington Custot Galleries; London, England “Robert Indiana: New & Classic Works;” Rosenbaum Contemporary; Boca Raton, Florida 2011 “Robert Indiana: Rare Works from 1959 on Coenties Slip;” Galerie
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Indiana
    Robert Indiana Arts in Education Robert Indiana first came to Maine in 1969 at the invitation of renowned Life magazine photographer Eliot Elisofon, who had a summer home on the island of Vinalhaven, some twelve miles from Rockland. On that first visit, Indiana saw an old Odd Fellows lodge called the Star of Hope. Built in 1874 by the island’s members of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the worn, distinctive, three-story Victorian building on the town’s main street appealed to Indiana, who has described himself as a “hopeless romantic.” Though long abandoned, it was still largely intact, with all its original furnishings and decorations found in Odd Fellows lodges throughout the United States that were essential for their ceremonies. Elisofon saw how much Indiana admired the building and soon bought it, then rented it to Indiana in the summertime. After Elisofon’s death in 1973, Indiana bought it from the photographer’s estate in 1977 and moved in the next year. He spent the rest of his life there, restoring the building, which, in 1981, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, in 1928, he knew at age six that he wanted to be an artist. Encouraged Robert Indiana, LOVE, 1996, 99.8 by his teachers, he soon proved himself adept at drawing and watercolor. His earliest formal training was at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, and after serving in the US Army Air Corps following World War II, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on the GI Bill.
    [Show full text]