Robert Indiana: Sixty-Six
Photo courtesy of Price Tower Arts Center
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Robert Indiana 66: Paintings and Sculpture.
UNITED STATES
BARTLESVILLE, OKLAHOMA • Price Tower Arts Center • Ongoing
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In his recent work, the 75-year-old artist Robert Indiana, returns to his early fascination with numbers, inspired by childhood memories of Phillips 66 gas stations. The self-described "American painter of signs" rose to fame with the Pop movement.
Curated by art critic Adrian Dannatt, the current show focuses on the above biographical element that runs throughout Mr. Indiana’s work: the inspiration that he drew from his father (who worked for the Phillips Petroleum Company, long headquartered in Bartlesville) and from the colors of the old Phillips 66 gas station signs against the Midwestern sky. The exhibition explores this theme through Mr. Indiana’s early drawings of Phillips 66 stations (made on the company’s letterhead), now-classic works from the 1960s (including the LOVE series), more recent paintings and sculptures and a new monumental outdoor sculpture, Sixty-Six.
Robert Indiana has also spoken of the number six as being connected with his memory of his father, Earl Clark, who worked for Phillips 66 tracking the movement of the company’s railroad tank cars, and who drove away on Route 66 when he abandoned his family. Mr. Indiana himself was born in the sixth month, into a family of six children, and got the news of his father’s death in June 1966, the year when he made the first LOVE painting.
Among the revelations in the Arts Center’s exhibition are Mr. Indiana’s childhood drawings on Phillips 66 stationary, which his father brought home from work, and which were bound in a scrapbook embossed with the legend "Phillips, Bartlesville, OK".
Price Tower Arts Center, housed in architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s tallest skyscraper, is a fine arts complex and museum dedicated to art, architecture and design. Wright’s international landmark contains permanent and changing exhibition galleries; Inn at Price Tower, a 21-room high-design hotel by Wendy Evans Joseph Architecture, New York; Copper Restaurant + Bar; and The Wright Place museum store. In June 2003, the Arts Center unveiled designs by architect Zaha Hadid for a proposed 58,000 square foot new museum facility to be built adjacent to the Wright landmark.
Price Tower Arts Center Web Site
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