Perhaps you’ve seen LOVE depicted on postcards. Now you’re face-to-face with the real thing. This is the LOVE Sculpture in Philadelphia. It is more than just a photo opportunity. It’s a symbol of the city itself.
The LOVE Sculpture stands tall. It’s thirteen feet high. The colorful aluminum artwork sits atop a seven-foot base. It has become an icon for the City of Brotherly Love. This entire plaza is increasingly known as Love Park.
Robert Indiana created LOVE. He was a Pop artist. His first single-artist museum exhibition occurred in Philadelphia in 1968. It was held at the Institute of Contemporary Art or ICA. Indiana worked in a style he termed verbal-visual. Words became elements of art.
LOVE had been developing as a motif in Indiana’s art since 1961. He created the design for a Christmas card. New York’s Museum of Modern Art issued a popular set of holiday cards with LOVE. A subsequent LOVE poster further disseminated the design. It struck a responsive chord in the emerging counterculture of the 1960s. Indiana’s work seemed symbolic of the times.
By the early 1970s, LOVE came to overshadow Indiana’s other work. The artist sported an 18-carat gold LOVE ring at the ICA exhibit opening. He authorized a series of 100 rings. Another artist mimicked Indiana’s design for the cover of the novel Love Story. Indiana also created a miniature version of LOVE for a postage stamp.
Philadelphia provided the setting for a first-day-of-issue ceremony. It was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The U.S. Postal Service sold more than 300 million LOVE stamps. The stamps were intended to be red, green, and blue. However they turned out to be red, green, and purple due to overprinting.
The LOVE Sculpture placed in John F. Kennedy Plaza featured the same colors as the stamp. These were red, green, and purple. Indiana loaned the work to Philadelphia for the Bicentennial in 1976. When the artist’s dealer recalled the sculpture to New York in 1978, a public outcry ensued. City officials had declined to pay $45,000 to keep LOVE in the park.
Ultimately, the price came down to $35,000. Fitz Eugene Dixon Jr. donated the money. He was the owner of the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team. The Quaker Export Packaging Company donated its labor to retrieve LOVE.
Secured again in John F. Kennedy Plaza, LOVE became a landmark. The Philadelphia Inquirer attributed the usage Love Park to homeless people. They frequented the plaza during the 1980s. During the 1990s, Love Park gained widespread currency among skateboarders.
Indiana continued to create LOVE sculptures into the late 1990s. By the twenty-first century, they could be found across the United States and beyond. Philadelphia did not possess LOVE alone. Nevertheless, the sculpture became one of the city’s most recognizable icons.
LOVE encourages openness to all types of love. It doesn’t depict heterosexual love in any specific way. It shows four letters instead. Philadelphia is the City of Brotherly Love. Indiana may also be thinking about the Quaker concept of tolerance and equality.
Remember the LOVE Sculpture. It symbolizes Philadelphia’s welcoming spirit. It stands for brotherly love in its most universal sense. Snap a photo. Share the love.