On View
Not on viewObject number2009.31
Number 2
Artist
Robert Indiana
(American, 1928 - 2018)
Date1968
Mediumscreenprint
Dimensionsimage: 25 1/4 × 19 3/4 in. (64.1 × 50.2 cm)
Credit LineBequest of Charlotte Collins from the Charles and Charlotte Collins Collection
Exhibition History"A Passion for Collecting: Prints of the 1960s and '70s from the Collins Collection," KIA Galleries 2 & 5 (Nov. 13, 2010 - Jan. 2, 2011).
"Drawn to Abstraction," Charles H. MacNider Museum of Art, Mason City, IA (June 24 - August 20, 2016).
"Drawn to Abstraction," Sardoni Art Gallery, Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA (August 25 - November 1, 2020).Label TextRobert Indiana’s use of numbers, words, and commercial color schemes often allies his work with Pop Art. However, his attention to numbers and short words stems less from their status as icons of popular culture, than from his very personal, idiosyncratic associations with letters and numbers throughout his life. He explained, “I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number.” The colors of his most famous work—the letters LOVE stacked as a square—came from the green and red sign of his father's employer, Phillips 66, against a blue sky.
Number 2 is part of a series of ten prints (0-9) published in conjunction with poetry by poet Robert Creeley in Numbers (1968). Both part of New York's avant-garde art scene, Creeley and Indiana each abandoned the traditional forms of his own medium in search of a stripped-down expression.
