Skip to content

Mississippi

1965

Images

A 70 by 60 inch black canvas with the title, Mississippi, painted in white stenciled letters across the center bottom edge of the painting. Above the title and dominating the canvas is a large circle consisting of a beige image of the state of Alabama, with the city of Philadelphia shown on the map. Around this image is a white ring with stenciled red text surrounded by a brown ring with black stars and another white ring with black stenciled text. The text reads, starting in the outer ring, "Just as in the anatomy of man every nation," and in the inner ring "must have its hind part."

Mississippi

1965

Oil on canvas

70 × 60 in. (177.8 × 152.4 cm)

Robert B. Mayer Family Collection

 

Artwork: © Morgan Art Foundation Ltd./Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party supporters demonstrating outside the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey; some hold signs with portraits of civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who were abducted and murdered in the city of Philadelphia, Mississippi,  

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party supporters demonstrating outside the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey; some hold signs with portraits of civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who were abducted and murdered in the city of Philadelphia, Mississippi

 

Photo: Warren K. Leffler, Library of Congress 

Description

Some of my paintings are lyrical but I should like to feel that most of my paintings are dramatic and not lyrical. I mean there is a verbal, certainly a verbal and I hope a plastic drama to my work . . . The verbal intent, say for instance, my present series, the Confederate States. First of all, the very first thing in my mind in these paintings, I mean, now my form is easy. I know—the format of my work is no longer a struggle. I have arrived at the format which is most effective for what I want to say and in the Confederate series I want to say something and I want to say something very urgent and I want to say something very dramatic and that, that’s very, very important. The message in these paintings is on top of the plastic aspects.

— Robert Indiana

 

Arthur C. Carr, “The Reminiscences of Robert Indiana,” New York, November 1965, Arthur C. Carr papers; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library, pp. 130–31.