Robert Indiana
Star of Hope Lodge in May 2018. Photo: Sarah Hansen.
As a boy, Robert Clark painted and drew and his parents encouraged his artistic talent. But pursuing art as a career? They heartily discouraged that, telling him he’d be eating bean soup and living in a garret. And that’s exactly what happened. Well, almost. He ended up in an Odd Fellows Lodge instead. Oh, and became an international sensation because of four letters.
But before he found the Odd Fellows Lodge on Vinalhaven and before his LOVE sculpture, Clark – known to the world as Robert Indiana – was living the kind of existence his parents warned him about: stone-broke and renting a top-floor loft inside a former ship chandlery and industrial warehouse in lower Manhattan that had seen better days.
Born in Indiana in 1928, Robert Indiana was at the very start of his artistic career when he first came to Maine on a scholarship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1953. He later said that summer was “the most beautiful summer of my life up to that point.”
When he returned to the school in 1969 as a visiting artist, his LOVE design was on its way to becoming one of the most recognizable images of the twentieth-century. It was during that return to the school that photographer Eliot Elisofon invited him to Vinalhaven for a visit. While on the island, the old Star of Hope Lodge caught his eye. “It was Adams and Hopper and my American dream,” Indiana said of the 1885 lodge – with a tower – that would become his home for the rest of his life.
Indiana moved to the Star of Hope full-time in 1978, restoring the building that became both his residence and his studio. Here he created a number of works, some related to Maine, such as the The Hartley Elegies, a suite of paintings inspired by the work of another artist with Maine ties, Marsden Hartley, and others not Maine-related, such as his HOPE graphic used by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
Two years before Robert Indiana died in 2018, he established the Star of Hope Foundation to preserve his Vinalhaven home and his artistic legacy. While turning the old lodge into a public museum was Indiana’s intent, the building, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is not yet open to visitors.
Author: Stephanie Bouchard
