Richard Brown Baker: Well, how many have you sent out into the world, as it were, in this form? How will we describe these: as wooden columnar pieces with painted areas and lettering sometimes? Or always? Do they always have lettering?
Robert Indiana: They do now. They didn’t to start with.
Brown Baker: Sometimes they have a little metal attachment, like a wheel . . . Always have a wheel or just some . . .?
Indiana: No, not all of them have wheels. Most of them did. The wheels came about because of meeting Steve Durkee. He knew of a place where there were a number of old wheels that had been abandoned and provided me with a great number of uniform wooden and iron wheels that had been probably for baby carriages or something. And he himself was working in this form at that time. And we often competed for the wood that was in these demolition sites.
Brown Baker: . . . But that is interesting, that just by having this group of wheels made accessible to you, you really worked them into a . . .
Indiana: However, it wasn’t an unnatural assimilation because I had become very interested in the circle and used, and have used, the circle consistently in my paintings. And after all, the wheel is merely a physical projection of the circle. So it was just a natural find and one which I could put to use with complete ease and relevancy.
Excerpt from Richard Brown Baker. Oral history interview with Robert Indiana, September 12 and November 7, 1963. Washington, D.C.: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1963.
