American Steer/Hug incorporates an image that recalls both the artist's rural background and the literary history of Indiana. When Indiana found a nineteenth-century stencil of a bull in his second studio on Coenties Slip, he was reminded of his childhood fantasies on an Indiana farm, and of Ross Lockridge Jr.’s novel Raintree County, which is set in New Castle, the artist’s birthplace, and which has a chapter called "A White Bull." The “Indiana” below the bull thus references both the artist and the state.
