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Indiana Jonesing

As pop art experiences a slow-motion return to the popular imagination, Robert Indiana has been borne along with it. A show at Pace Gallery highlights the artist’s preoccupation with the American dream, far beyond his most famous work, ‘LOVE.’

Robert Indiana
The American dream, an idea inflected less with financial success than the struggle to find a balance between competing claims, was the enduring theme of Indiana’s career. Photo: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
Marion Maneker
June 10, 2025

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about Pace Gallery’s Robert Indiana show, The American Dream, ever since I saw it a few weeks ago. It’s not that Indiana’s art has been forgotten, even with much of it overshadowed by his most famous work—the stacked letters spelling out L-O-V-E, ubiquitous on MoMA postcards, 450 million stamps, and countless riffs and rip-offs. A major retrospective of his work at the Whitney a dozen years ago, Beyond Love, tried to correct that, pointing out the breadth of themes in the pop artist’s work, including “American identity, racial injustice, … death, sin, and forgiveness.” Heavy stuff.