Robert Indiana Biography
Robert Indiana, born Robert Clark (New Castle, September 13, 1928 – Vinalhaven, May 19, 2018), was an American artist, set designer and costume designer, associated with the Pop Art movement. Indiana moved to New York in 1954 and joined the Pop Art movement, using characteristic image drawings to make commercial art approaches mixed with existentialism, which gradually evolved towards what Indiana calls "sculptural poems". Indiana's work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, particularly numbers and short words such as "EAT", "HUG" and "LOVE". He is also known for having painted the extraordinary basketball court once used by the Milwaukee Bucks in that city's sports arena, the US Cellular Arena, with a large M shape occupying both halves of the court. His sculpture in the atrium of the Taipei 101 skyscraper, called 1-0 (2002, aluminum), uses multicolored numbers to suggest the conduct of world trade and patterns of human life. Indiana was a theatrical set and costume designer, as in the 1976 Santa Fe Opera production of Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, based on the life of American suffragette Susan B. Anthony. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Indiana produced a series of Peace Paintings, which were exhibited in New York in 2004. Indiana has lived as a resident of the island town of Vinalhaven, Maine, since 1978.
