Robert Indiana was born in September 1928 in New Castle, Indiana.    He moved to New York City in 1954 and joined the Pop Art movement, which used distinctive imagery drawn from commercial art and advertising.  In his work, Indiana blended Pop existentialism, gradually moving toward what Indiana calls "sculptural poems".
    In 1962, Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery hosted his first New York solo exhibition. Indiana has since enjoyed solo exhibitions at over thirty museums and galleries worldwide. His works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including MOMA, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, The Netherlands; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Brandeis Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts; Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the Los Angeles County Museum, California, among many others.
Indiana's work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words like EAT, HUG, and, his best-known example, LOVE. His iconic work LOVE was first created for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1964 and later was included on an eight-cent United States Postal Service postage stamp in 1973, the first of their regular series of "love stamps." Sculptural versions of the image have been installed at numerous American and international locations. In 2008, Indiana created an image similar to his iconic LOVE (letters tacked two to a line, the letter "o" tilted on its side), but this time showcasing the word "HOPE," and donated all proceeds from the image to Barack Obama's presidential campaign.
Indiana has resided in the island town of Vinalhaven, Maine since 1978. Indiana has been a theatrical set and costume designer, such as the 1976 production by the Santa Fe Opera of Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, based on the life of suffragette Susan B. Anthony. He appeared in Andy Warhol's film Eat (1964), which is a single 45-minute shot of Indiana eating a mushroom. 

Love, 1966-1997
Welded aluminum AP 1/4
Gift of Philip and Muriel Berman
Asa Packer Campus: Campus Square

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