Robert Indiana, an American painter, sculptor and graphic artist was born in New Castle, Indiana in 1928. He graduated from Arsenal Technical High School, Indianapolis in 1942 and had his first one-man show of watercolors.
Indiana's work has evolved into hard-edged graphic images of words, logos and typographic forms, earning him a reputation as one of the country's leading contemporary artists.
From 1949 to 1953 he attended the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. He then completed his BFA requirements at the university of Edinburgh while on a travel fellowship, and later moved to New York.
In the mid 1950s he began doing hard-edged paintings; the first ones based on the doubled form of the ginkgo leaf, a motif that continued for several years.
In the early 1960s he did his first constructions of junk wood and weathered iron. In the early 1960s several of his works were purchased by major museums and collectors and his pieces were included in many exhibitions, including his first one-man show in 1962 at the Stable Gallery, New York. In 1964 he collaborated with Andy Warhol on the film EAT and in the same year received his first public commission, a work for the exterior of the New York State Pavilion at the New York World's Fair -- a 20-foot EAT Sign.
In 1967 he exhibited one of his few figurative works, Mother and Father (1963, collection of the artist), at the Ninth Sao Paulo Bienal, Brazil.
In 1978, Robert Indiana relocated to Maine. In the early 1990s, Indiana created a series of paintings he called "The Hartley Elegies" that were inspired by and created in homage to American modernist Marsden Hartley.