This work is one of two Chief paintings. The paintings are unusual in Indiana’s oeuvre for their incorporation of cursive letters, which evoke the Coca-Cola logo. The word “chief” would appear again six years later, in the same cursive script, in the painting Decade: Autoportrait 1965 (1975). In an interview with Susan Elizabeth Ryan (May 5, 1992) Indiana noted that it was a reference to having met President Johnson, the Commander in Chief, when his work was exhibited at The White House Festival of the Arts in June 1965. The work exhibited in the festival was The Calumet (1961), whose pendant is the sculpture Chief (1962). The painting shares the same red, yellow, and orange palette with The Calumet and the painting's danger stripes recall those in Chief, however the chief referrenced in those works is Hiawatha, the precolonial Native American leader and co-founder of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Chief was exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, and the Tampa Museum of Art, Florida in the exhbiiton Robert Indiana: A Sculpture Retrospective.