Artist, Robert Indiana: One of my first jobs was in an art store here in New York. I dressed the window with art postcards and reproductions. One day, I had put a Matisse postcard in the window. Ellsworth Kelly was passing by on 57th Street and saw it. And came in and asked for that particular postcard. And that’s how I met Ellsworth Kelly.
At that very time, I was very desperately in need of a new loft, a new studio. It just so happened that Ellsworth was also thinking he wanted a larger loft. He encouraged me to look on Coenties Slip, and I found the corner loft at 31 Coenties Slip.
And just a few days or a week or so later Ellsworth took another loft on Coenties Slip, which I had looked at myself. But it was it was something like 45 a month. And mine was 30 a month.
The problem was that the loft was piled high with refuse I doubt very much if I would have faced it by myself, but having Ellsworth as a neighbor made it much, much simpler.
The constructions like this came into being because many of the old warehouses were being raised in the neighborhood and the wood was just lying around waiting to be picked up. And I brought it into my studio.
the wheels came from 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 probably been for baby carriages or something.
Then, when I did start using words in 1960 these were, first on the constructions, because the constructions just needed the words. They did not look complete without them.