‘Robert Indiana’ pops up at Mcnay
‘Love’ sculptor’s hopeful work fills ‘a need for optimism’
“Robert Indiana: A Legacy of Love,” the Mcnay Art Museum’s big fall show, should prove irresistible to fans of pop art.
In addition to Indiana’s 1967 piece “The Metamorphosis of Norma Jean Mortenson,” which depicts Marilyn Monroe, one gallery holds Andy Warhol’s portraits of Jackie Kennedy and Elvis Presley, Claes Oldenburg’s floppy “French Fries and Ketchup” and a pair of Roy Lichtenstein’s works evoking single comics panels.
“You could stand in the center and do a 360 and get the full spectrum of pop art in one fell swoop,” said René Paul Barilleaux, head of curatorial affairs for the museum, who co-curated the exhibit.
The exhibit marks the third time the museum has cast a spotlight on Indiana (1928-2018), who is best known for textbased works such as his “Love” sculptures featuring a tilted “O.” The museum has long displayed a large “Love” on its grounds, where it has proved popular with those seeking selfie fodder.
This time around, the cura
tors are showing the late artist’s work in conversation with pieces by his contemporaries and by later generations who also use text in distinctive ways. The show includes pieces by San Antonio-based artists, including Ethel Shipton, Gary Sweeney and the late Chuck Ramirez.
The show digs into how Indiana used text. A digital display projects factoids about “Decoding Decade: Autoportrait 1961” onto a vinyl reproduction of the work. Among the tidbits: South Ferry was the neighborhood where he lived, and the number 72 references the year that he began this particular series of
symbolic self-portraits.
“The text is not arbitrary,” Barilleaux said. “Everything has purpose.”
Indiana’s use of text should look familiar to contemporary audiences, said Richard Aste, the museum’s director and CEO.
“Sixty years ago, when he started creating these textbased works of art, he almost saw where we were going today in how we are communicating, in short bursts of communication — sometimes a single word, sometimes a symbol or emoji,” Aste said.
The exhibit brings Indiana’s influence squarely into the 21st
century with six digital pieces commissioned from Annika Hansteen-izora and displayed in the form of an Instagram feed.
The exhibit has been in the works for a while, though it has been moved up in the Mcnay’s schedule. The museum originally planned to show the Whitney Museum of American Art’s blockbuster “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925.”
The coronavirus pandemic squashed those plans. Rather than sending the show on tour, the Whitney kept it at home and extended its run there. So the Mcnay had to come up with something else to show.
Had the Indiana show come together later, the approach likely would have been very different, Barilleaux said. Because of the turmoil in the world right now, they decided to emphasize more hopeful themes. That takes literal form in the inclusion of Indiana’s 2012 screenprints “Four Seasons of Hope,” a late work featuring four iterations of the word “Hope” in the same style in which he did “Love.”
“The need for healing, the need for optimism, that really informed the show,” Barilleaux said.
The election also factored in. An altar has been created to show some of Indiana’s handcut collages depicting his costume and set designs for “The Mother of Us All,” Gertrude Stein’s opera about the life of Susan B. Anthony and the fight for women’s suffrage. This year marks the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote, making it a timely inclusion in the show.
The exhibit also includes some screenprints by Shepard Fairey, who may be best-known for creating the “Hope” poster for Barack Obama.
“It sort of serendipitously came together within this moment that it’s being shown,” said Lauren Thompson, who co-curated the show with Barilleaux, Edward Hayes and Alexis T. Meldrum.