Especially early in his career, Robert Indiana thought of himself primarily as a poet and a painter, and in the early 1960s, he created a body of work inspired by the work of nineteenth-century American literary figures including Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Writers like Melville and Whitman resonated with Indiana on multiple levels: for their groundbreaking expressions of the American experience but also for their paeans to seafaring, which were widely read within the queer community as coded investigations of same-sex desire.
Robert Indiana: A Sculpture Retrospective features several works Indiana based on his engagement with Melville, including The Melville Triptych, which features lines from Melville’s most famous novel, Moby Dick; Ahab, named after the novel's antihero protagonist; and Call me Ishmael and Call me Indiana, which allude to its famous opening line.
Robert Indiana: A Sculpture Retrospective is on view through September 23.