The Santa Fe Opera

Robert Clark was born Indiana. When he moved to New York, in 1954, he took his native state's name, becoming Robert Indiana. This gesture presaged his Pop-inspired fascination with Americana, signage, and the power of ordinary words. In his studio on Coenties Slip at the tip of Manhattan, Indiana made assemblages of scrap materials and found objects, using stencils to introduce words into his art. By the early 1960s, he was creating eye-popping paintings of text, numbers, and symbols that related to the hard-edge abstraction of the day, and included political and social overtones. In a second moment, he moved to the island of Vinalhaven off the coast of Maine, where he continues to work.
When he was at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Indiana studied various printmaking techniques. However, later he settled on screenprinting, a medium that suited his simplified forms and electric colors. Additionally, the flexible screens could be easily reused to produce serial variations, which is the original mark in Indiana's printmaking. Totally, he has completed more than one hundred sixty prints, working with commercial and fine-art workshops worldwide.