SAIC Alum Robert Indiana featured in Wall Street Journal

An article in the Wall Street Journal looks at Robert Indiana’s (BFA 1954) tribute to Walt Whitman. Indiana’s Year of Meteors (1961) was one of his first major works, and although it is considered a work of pop art, “it has an unusual depth of meaning, in referring to American literature, rather than mass media, and in its layered content,” says author John Wilmerding. The hard-edges and flat surfaces of blue and green were inspired by Indiana’s friend Elsworth Kelly and a symbolic reference to the green land of Manhattan surrounded by the blue waters of New York Bay in the poem Leaves of Grass. Indiana’s inclusion of text from Whitman’s poem portends his future use of words in his work, most notably in his famous Love sculptures.

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