Robert Indiana is perhaps best known for taking everyday symbols of roadside America and making them into brilliantly colored geometric pop art. His work has been at the forefront of contemporary art for making cultural and political statements.
Born Robert Clark in 1928 in New Castle, Indiana (he adopted the name of his native state as a pseudonymous surname early in his career - and it stuck). Throughout his Midwestern childhood, highway signs had a symbolic importance for him. His father worked for Phillips 66 gas, and when he left his wife and son, he did so down Route 66. The diner his mother operated had the familiar "EAT" sign looming overhead.
Indiana began his studies at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and continued on at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, New York. Subsequently, he went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he receieved a degree in 1953 and won a traveling fellowship to Europe, where he attended Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.
Even while in Europe, Indiana's style remained consistent to the popular culture of America. From the start he worked with bold, contrasting and sometimes clashing colors that mirrored familiar signs along highways. The "American Dream" has been a recurring theme in Indiana's work, using it to both celebrate and criticize the national way of life. His art has created and invented new meanings for the words and symbols that define the culture of the mid-20th century.