I say the Philadelphia LOVE was a high point. Probably the highest for me was to see the LOVE in Central Park across from the Plaza Hotel [November 29, 1971–January 5, 1972]. And its effect on people was immediate and spontaneous. People, people could just not resist climbing in, through around, all over the LOVE. And of course that wasn’t so happy because Cor-Ten steel is very, very, rather a tender medium, and takes scuffing and graffiti and so forth very badly. But that was a very gratifying experience for me. It was quite obvious that everybody did love the LOVE.
— Robert Indiana, interviewed by Susan Elizabeth Ryan, January 13, 1991, Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech Archive 1987–2005
Indiana first began experimenting with his stacked LOVE image in 1964, in a series of rubbings that he sent to friends as Christmas cards. Over the following months Indiana experimented further with this format, painting the first canvases in his LOVE series. In May of 1965 the first LOVE painting to be exhibited in a gallery was included in a solo exhibition at the Rolf Nelson Gallery, Los Angeles, and in November the Museum of Modern Art’s Christmas card featuring the artist’s red, blue, and green image was released.
Indiana’s first LOVE sculpture, which debuted in his 1966 solo show at the Stable Gallery, New York, was a 12-inch hand-cut aluminum work published by Multiples, Inc. His first monumental LOVE, a 144-inch Cor-Ten steel sculpture, was fabricated at Lippincott, Inc, in 1970, and made its public debut that year in Seven Outside, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. This 96-inch edition of his Cor-Ten steel LOVE was fabricated between 1997 and 1999 at Milgo/Bufkin, Brooklyn, New York.