Phaidon is preparing an October 28 release for Robert Indiana: An American Icon, and an excerpt by art historian Prudence Peiffer published by Artnet News on October 9 argues that the Pop artist's career amounted to a sustained interrogation of what it means to be an American artist. Few postwar figures wove their own biography into the country's ambitions and ambivalences as deliberately as Indiana did over six decades and across mediums, Peiffer writes. His paintings and sculptures layer references ranging from slavery and the Great Depression to presidential elections, while everywhere there are references to love: of the United States, of fellow artists and writers, and of men. That last thread mattered for a gay artist who emerged when homosexuality was still illegal and actively policed in New York. Indiana's literary heroes, including Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane, sit in his work alongside pinball-machine vocabulary and manufacturing logos. The excerpt returns to formative episodes. For his 1963 museum debut, as one of 15 artists in curator Dorothy Miller's MoMA survey Americans 1963, Indiana submitted not an artist statement but a double acrostic poem by his friend T. Henry Smith that stuffed billboards, scaffolds, and highways into verses whose capitalized letters spell his name vertically. In 1958 he had rechristened himself, replacing his family name Clark with his birthplace, after completing a 19-foot mural titled Stavrosis, from the Greek for crucifixion. Peiffer also revisits the downtown years. A chance 1956 encounter with Ellsworth Kelly at an art supply store on 57th Street led Indiana to a former sail-making loft on Coenties Slip, then a maritime street where signs were more profuse than trees. He settled there among Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, and others from 1956 to 1967, keeping oversize journals that recorded curators' visits alongside snowfalls and demolition-site hauls. Breakthrough came through language: The American Dream, I, which MoMA acquired in 1961, turned an abstract canvas into bright, flat circles, stars, and words evoking Route 66 gas signs. In fall 1962, Gene Swenson's ARTnews piece on the new American sign painters and the Sidney Janis show The New Realists introduced Pop art, though Indiana's earnest absorption of 18th- and 19th-century Americana set him apart from the harder-edged cohort.