Indiana attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1949 to 1953 before moving to New York in 1954. This drawing comes from a series completed during the early 1960s featuring the frottage (rubbing) technique. He used a 19th-century brass commercial stencil from the American Hay Company, discovered in an abandoned loft in Lower Manhattan. Indiana laid paper over the stencil and transferred the dimensional image onto the sheet using soft graphite and hatching.