Arthur Carr: I wonder now if we could come to the commemorative aspect of your work . . . I think of the Year of Meteors. . . .
Robert Indiana: . . . although it is commemorative and I painted in that sense, in that the Great Eastern—the thought was that the Great Eastern in entering New York harbor, since the piers at the time were on the east side instead of the west side, the Great Eastern would have sailed right by my studio and right past my window. But the point here is that this is an event which Walt Whitman was commemorating, so that it was a second hand kind of commemorating.
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. 68–69.