Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, on September 13th, 1928. His family later located to Indianapolis, where he attended high school. He moved to New York City in 1954, where he joined the pop art movement. Robert Indiana first gained international attention in the 1960s for combining the American vernacular of road and shop signs with an elevated, conceptual approach that transformed these familiar images into abstractions of American identity. Indiana's best-known works consist of bold, simple, or iconic images, often encapsulated in short words such as EAT, HUG, or his most famous example, LOVE. The image for the LOVE piece was originally designed for a Christmas card for New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1964. Later, the same image was featured on an eight-cent United States Postal Service stamp, the first of their regular series of "love stamps." Three-dimensional sculptures of the same image can be found at a number of American museums and institutions. More recently, Indiana reformulated his iconic style to suit a new political generation by designing a logo for President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, substituting the word "hope" for "love." A stainless steel sculpture of HOPE was unveiled at the Pepsi Center in Denver in advance of the 2008 Democratic National Convention formally recognizing Obama's candidacy. Indiana continues to produce works of art that are both novel and familiar, most recently designing a variation of LOVE for Google to replace the search engine's well-known logo on Valentine's Day 2011.
