On a foggy summer’s day, the Rockland ferry chugs across Penobscot Bay, twelve miles to Vinalhaven Island. A silvery blanket wraps around the boat and brings to mind Robert Indiana’s painting FOG, in which gray letters float on a gray-painted canvas.

After an hour, the shroud lifts and Carvers Harbor appears with its anchored boats, sun-bleached lobster traps, and shingled village shops. Rising above Main Street is a yellow, three-storied, mansard-roofed Victorian, with American flags painted across the front. This is the Star of Hope, home and studio of Robert Indiana.

A major retrospective, up now until October 25 at the Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, features more than seventy pieces of the artist’s work. The exhibit takes over a large portion of the museum and spills over into the lobby, garden, a downtown park, and the roof.

At the Star of Hope, Indiana sits in his living room, on the second floor, surrounded by his paintings, a collection of bowls and pottery, and many large [toy] stuffed lions and giraffes. He points to a shelf of small sculptures, as he talks about recognition, which includes three honorary doctorate degrees and three visits to the White House.

In 1965, at the invitation of President Johnson, Indiana attended the White House Festival of the Arts Exhibitions, where sixty-five works were borrowed from nearly forty museums around the country.

Indiana’s work was among them, and, as he tells it, Lady Bird Johnson was asked which painting was her favorite. She thought about this and a second later replied, “Christina’s World. Why I can see every blade of grass in it.”

Indiana keeps a poker face as he tells this story, but at age eighty, he could tell many stories about being overlooked, dubbed the “LOVE artist,” and filed categorically under the heading “pop.” The Farnsworth’s show, accompanied by a one-hour long documentary by Dale Schierholt, presents a rounded view of the art in context with the artist’s life, home, and studio. Thus, Indiana considers this to be his most gratifying moment.

“This is my most beautiful show ever,” Indiana says.

Born Robert Clark on September 13, 1928, in New Castle, Indiana, he describes himself as a product of the Depression. Shortly after his birth, his father lost his job and then the family home. The Clarks moved twenty-one times before young Robert turned seventeen. He made sense of his life connecting, in a dot-to-dot fashion, house numbers, significant births and deaths, personal events, and cultural iconography.

In a 2004 interview, Indiana gave an example to Steve Lafreniere showing the significance behind his painting USA 666: “My father was born in June, the sixth month, to a family of six members, and he worked for Phillips 66. When he left my mother, he traveled west on Highway 66, passing signs that said, ‘Use 666,’ which was a cold remedy. In my mother's mind, of course, it was the sign of the devil. And that's what she considered my father for abandoning her.”

This is the way Indiana’s mind works—everything means something, and while the symbols may be personal, when the artist turns them into art, they resonate universally.

“Robert Indiana is the language of coincidences,” says Michael K. Komanecky, interim director and chief curator of the Farnsworth Museum. “He has drawn upon these coincidences to make intriguing and compelling work.”

Coincidence or maybe serendipity inspired Clark from age six. His first-grade teacher, Ruth Kaufman Haase, asked to keep a couple of his drawings, because, as she told him, he would become famous someday. When he did, he hunted her down and she still had his work. She asked if he would sign them with his new name.

“This was very pivotal to me,” says Indiana about this teacher’s belief in him. “I could do nothing less than become a famous artist.”

Indiana served in the Army Air Corps, attended the Art Institute of Chicago, moved to Manhattan, set up a studio on Coenties Slip, and associated with a group of young artists determined to change the language of abstraction: Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, James Rosenquist, Cy Twombly, and Agnes Martin.

By 1960, Indiana added words to his paintings and sculptures. Few liked this idea, including his friends. “I’ve always been as interested in literature as art. I’ve been keeping a journal since grade school. Words are my medium.” Indiana credits Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, The Bells, for enabling him to see the power of a single word.

Right away, Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, noticed Indiana and included one of his sculptures in a show, The Art of Assemblage. The next year, when Indiana was only thirty-three years old, the museum purchased American Dream #1.

For the 1964 World’s Fair, held in Flushing, New York, architect Philip Johnson commissioned Indiana to create a 20 by 20' sculpture that would hang on the exterior of the New York State Pavilion. Indiana created EAT, a flashing-light sculpture, reminiscent of signs mounted on highway truck stops and diners, in the mid-twentieth century.

Fair-goers not only noticed, but lined up at the pavilion, thinking this was a place to eat. Confusion ended when fair administrators ordered the lights off, and Indiana never saw the sign lit again—not for forty-five years.

Komanecky retrieved EAT from storage and had to go before Rockland city officials to obtain a permit. He had to convince them that this was sculpture, not a sign, and they agreed. Komanecky had the sculpture installed on Farnsworth’s roof, where, at last, the artist could see it lit.

There’s a backstory to every one of Indiana’s creations. In the case of EAT, in 1949, Indiana was in the Army and stationed in Anchorage, Alaska, when he was called back to Indiana, to see his dying mother. She looked up from her hospital bed and asked, have you had anything to eat? Then she died. EAT/DIE was the original diptych, which seems more in keeping with the sad irony of this story, but, as Indiana says, the DIE was dropped somewhere along the way. EAT by itself, in the fashion of a diner sign, took over, triggering memories of comfort foods, bustling kitchens, and the simple joy of nourishment.

While the art world responded slowly to Indiana’s mixing of words with art, “one word was accepted: L-O-V-E,” says Indiana.

In 1964, the Museum of Modern Art commissioned Indiana to create an image for its Christmas card. Indiana proposed three versions of stacked letters, L-O-V-E, with a tilted O. The museum chose the one with red and green letters set on a blue background. To Indiana, the red and green symbolized a Phillips 66 gasoline station sign set against blue sky. To MOMA, it meant Christmas. LOVE became a bestseller. Simple and direct, the word fit with a growing anti-war generation, who would soon carry “make love not war” protest signs and use the word love interchangeably with peace and turn it into a generational adjective: love beads, love children, love fests, and love-ins.

When the U.S. Postal Service approached Indiana and asked if they could turn LOVE into a postage stamp, Indiana liked the idea because he had been a stamp collector. In 1973, the postal service paid Indiana $1,000 for the image and it became a runaway success—selling 333 million “prints,” as Indiana likes to call them. This was just the beginning. LOVE appeared on key chains, clocks, T-shirts, needlepoint samplers, and any object on which a silkscreen image would stick. LOVE became pop art at its ultimate—“the most plagiarized work of art ever,” Indiana says. He tried to copyright it, but learned he could not copyright a word.

The stamp earned Indiana the title of “the LOVE artist” and a slightly uncomfortable place in pop art. “But he is not a pop artist,” says Komanecky. “He explores universal subjects and themes. There is a remarkable diversity in his work.”

The Farnsworth retrospective is called Robert Indiana and the Star of Hope, which gives the studio almost equal billing with the artist. “Each of Bob’s homes and studios has always been powerful to him,” says Komanecky. “But the Star of Hope is the most powerful.” It’s not just his home, but his archive, museum, and personal muse.

“This is the kind of home I always dreamed of having,” says Indiana. “I’d never in my wildest dreams thought I’d find it.”

In 1969, Eliot Elisofon, a LIFE magazine photographer, invited Indiana to Vinalhaven. As the boat pulled into the harbor, Indiana spotted the weatherworn structure, built by the International Order of Odd Fellows in 1874, by then abandoned.

Ten days later, Elisofon bought it and Indiana spent every fall there. After the photographer’s death, Indiana bought it and moved there permanently in 1978.

The Star of Hope is not only a time-capsule of Vinalhaven’s former Victorian architecture, but it houses an intact nineteenth-century Odd Fellows ceremonial hall, complete with murals, regalia, a chandelier, and velvet drapery that appears to crown absent thrones. With Indiana’s interest in history, collecting, and iconography, the Star of Hope creates an intriguing, if not mysterious environment.

Among the Odd Fellows’ artifacts left behind was a needlework sampler that mixed the fraternal organization’s own iconography—shaking hands—with a string of simple words: friendship, love, and truth. It is, as Indiana likes to call it, another “magic coincidence.”

On September 11, 2001, Indiana was in lower Manhattan when the two planes hit the World Trade Center Towers. When he returned to Vinalhaven, he reacted by nailing plywood across the front windows of the Star of Hope and painting the new front with American flags. He hung even more flags from the widow’s walk.

His outrage poured out as he painted Afghanistan, which is a map of the country with a star for Kabul, encircled by a stenciled message: “Just as in the anatomy of man, every planet must have its hind part.” The United Nations considered buying it until officials actually read the message.

“Thankfully, I’ve moved away from being a hawk to a dove,” says Indiana, referring to his more recent HOPE series, inspired by Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope. Like LOVE, it is a type block with a jaunty O, which has made its way to paintings, prints, and sculpture.

The Star of Hope faces the harbor and a giant granite-carved eagle perched across the street, a monument to the nineteenth-century stonecutters who created it and so many others like it. The eagle and Indiana’s painted flags mark a patriotic spot in Vinalhaven, in keeping with this artist who has turned America’s culture, attitudes, and politics into painted poems. It gives understanding to why Indiana calls himself “the most American artist.”

Debbie Hagan has been writing about art for twenty-five years. She is the reviews editor for Art New England magazine and author of the narrative nonfiction book, Against the Tide (Doukathsan Press, 2008).