Contemporary Crash Course: Adopting the Past: Robert Indiana and Early American Modernism

Unlike Pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who emphasized cultural amnesia that marked consumerism of the postwar era, Robert Indiana used his art to strike up dialogues with American modernist artists Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, and writers Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Sasha Nicholas, Independent Curator and Art Historian, explores these dialogues and considers how Indiana’s interest in the American past shaped his own work and relates to the broader cultural context of the 1960s.