“Sidney Janis’ extravaganza ‘New Realists’ which requires an extra gallery to accommodate the Pop flood hangs his Black American Dream # 2 in juxtaposition with some of the British precursors such as Black and Phillips. The show creates a critical furor. A dark horse, The Black Dream, goes immediately into the immensely respectable private collection of the president of the Museum of Modern Art.”
— Robert Indiana
Except from the artist’s autochronology, first published in John W. McCoubrey and Robert Indiana. Robert Indiana. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art and Falcon Press, 1968.
“The first two or three dreams I would say were cynical. I was really being very critical of certain aspects of the American experience. ‘Dream’ was used in an ironic sense. Then, as they progressed, they lost that irony; shall we say, particularly with the fifth Dream, where I became involved with the imagery and the experience of Demuth. And the same is true of the sixth Dream. And, as the Dreams continue via the autobiographical series, negative aspects have pretty well disappeared. They really are all celebrations. It is a celebration of ten years of my life. [At first] they were, let’s say, very caustic—that might be a better word than saying ‘cynical.'”
— Robert Indiana
Excerpt from Donald B. Goodall, “Conversations with Robert Indiana,” in Robert L. B. Tobin, William Katz, and Donald B. Goodall. Robert Indiana. Austin: University of Texas, 1977.
