Indiana began a series of Great American Dream frottages in the mid-sixties. These drawings were linked to his series of American Dream paintings, and incorporate a nineteenth-century stencil of a bull that Indiana found in his second studio on Coenties Slip. Indiana noted that the image refers both to the chapter “A White Bull,” from Ross Lockridge, Jr.’s novel Raintree County, and to his own rural background and childhood fantasies on an Indiana farm. Many of the drawings in the series have geographic subtitles, in this instance San Francisco, thus they celebrate not just the geography of the Midwest but that of the whole United States.
