In 1977 Indiana conceived a new version of his iconic LOVE sculpture, AHAVA, using the Hebrew word for “love” in the same distinctive quadripartite composition that he had developed in the mid-1960s. It was a memorial tribute to Bishop James A. Pike, who died in the Israeli desert and for whom Indiana worked at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. The characters on the right are the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which read consecutively spell “av,” meaning father, while the two characters on the left represent one of the acronyms for God in Hebrew.
The 48-inch stainless steel AHAVA was first displayed in Robert Indiana: A Sculpture Retrospective, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, June 16–September 23, 2018, and was recently included in Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery, at the Procuratie Vecchie, Venice, Italy, April 20–November 24, 2024.