Robert indiana brief biography of joe
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Robert Indiana (b.1928, New Castle, Indiana; d.2018, Vinalhaven, Maine), American painter, printmaker and sculptor, is best known for his LOVE series from the 1960s. Born Robert Clark, Indiana adopted the name of the state in which he grew up. In his work, Indiana adapts the iconography of road signs, advertising posters and logos to create his Pop art icons. Inspired by poetry as much as art, Indiana turns words into objects in a bid to simultaneously celebrate and question the American Dream and other such myths. Robert Indiana studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, before moving to New York in 1954.
Indiana came to prominence in 1961, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York included him in its important Art of Assemblage exhibition of 1961. The following year Indiana had his first solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery, New York. Throughout the 1960s Indiana addressed issues of love and death through his shar
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Robert Indiana has made of basic American iconography the most subtle and evocative resonance of color his time has seen. He has used the figure of language and number to echo endlessly the paradigms of human emotions and made LOVE an international sign of transcendent power. He is the most deftly Emersonian of our painters, the consummate signer of our human declaration.
—Robert Creeley
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Robert Indiana sitting in the plant room at his Coenties Slip studio. Photo: © William John Kennedy. Image artighet of KIWI Arts Group
One of the preeminent figures in American art since the 1960s, Robert Indiana played a central role in the development of assemblage art, hard-edge painting, and Pop art. Indiana, a self proclaimed “American painter of signs,” created a highly original body of work that explores American identity, personal history, and the power of abstraction and language, establishing an important legacy that resonate
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Earl and Carmen Clark with their Model-T Ford, ca. 1925
September 13. Robert Earl Clark is born in New Castle, Indiana. He is taken to Richmond, Indiana, to live with caretakers until his adoption by Earl Clark and Carmen Watters Clark. The Clarks reside in Indianapolis, where Earl works as a clerk for the Western Oil Refining Company. The marriage is the second for both Earl and Carmen, and the couple’s decision to adopt is informed by Carmen’s loss of a son to whooping cough during her first marriage.
Shell Oil purchases Western Oil. A few years later, Earl loses his job, and the family loses their home and is forced to move to a dilapidated farmhouse in the country. Earl finds work with a number of oil companies during the next few years, even pumping gas for a time. As a result of the family’s misfortunes and Carmen’s restlessness, the Clark family lives in twenty-one different homes by the time Robert is seventeen years old.
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