Miles from America: The Third Century

In 1962, Rosenquist burst onto the scene with a seminal exhibition at the Green Gallery in New York City. Along with his contemporaries Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol (several of whom also had landmark exhibitions that same year) Rosenquist was heralded for focusing on the often banal iconography of quotidian life, with particular attention to images derived from advertising and mass media. References to popular culture within the realm of "high art' was considered shocking, as was the often deadpan approach adopted by the artists, their use of commercial techniques, and use of marks signifying industrial production. Rosenquist drew on his background as a billboard artist and created compositions that were often of a very large scale and characterized by clashing colors, nearly fluorescent tones, and highly legible images often drawn from advertising and other mass media sources. As seen in Miles, Rosenquist's compositions were complex arrangements of colors, lines, and forms. Here, the artist focuses on the forms of the Kennedy half dollar, creating a rounded form with ridges that emulates the circle and sides of the coin. Rather than a straight-forward depiction of the face of the coin, Rosenquist breaks the form into thin triangular slices in which fragments of words and familiar images (yet not the President's face) appear.