Yield Brother belongs to a series of paintings from the 1960s. The first work in this series, Yield Brother, was painted expressly for a 1963 benefit exhibition held by the Bertrand Russel Peace Foundation. This was followed by three larger diamond shaped Yield Brother paintings, as well as a number of smaller canvases, including this one.
The smaller canvases are based on a composition of a vertical bar within a circle inscribed with the motto “Yield Brother.” This painting is unique in that the bar is within an octagon within the circle. The bar references both the cartographic plans of the Manhattan wharves found in Indiana’s The Melville Triptych (1962), and the central element of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s peace symbol, the D (for disarmament) based on the letters of the semaphore system.