Colby College Art Museum

One of the pre-eminent figures of American art since the 1960s, Robert Indiana (b1928) has been a pioneer of assemblage art, hard-edge abstraction and pop art. Over the past five decades, Indiana’s work has explored the power of abstraction and language, American identity and personal history. He studied in Chicago, Maine and Edinburgh before settling in New York in 1954.

As a self-proclaimed “American painter of signs,” Indiana gained international renown in the early 1960s for employing the vernacular form of American road and shop signs, combining it with a sophisticated formal and conceptual approach that turned this familiar vocabulary into something entirely new. His distinctive rendering of LOVE, in paintings, sculptures and prints, has become an icon of 20th-century art.