American Indian Theme I (C.160) opens Roy Lichtenstein's American Indian Theme Series, produced in 1980 as six woodcuts on handmade Suzuki paper — his most direct encounter with non-Western decorative traditions. The series drew on the symbolic imagery, geometric patterning, and ceremonial forms of multiple Indigenous American traditions, submitting them to the same scrutiny he had previously directed at comic books, Impressionism, and classical architecture.

The first print establishes the series' approach — a densely packed picture of symbolic forms in primary colours and black, the imagery drawn from the decorative and ceremonial traditions of Native American art. The woodcut medium was a deliberate choice: its associations with vernacular printmaking and craft traditions made it appropriate for a series drawing on cultural forms that had developed outside the fine art mainstream, the physicality of the woodblock introducing a material quality absent from the screenprints and lithographs that dominated his output.

The series was produced at a moment of growing critical awareness around the appropriation of Indigenous culture by Western artists — a debate that extended back through the Abstract Expressionists' use of Native American symbolism in the 1940s and 1950s. Lichtenstein approached his source material as he had approached all his sources,, without claim to authentic representation or ethnographic understanding. American Indian Theme I (C.160) examined the decorative and symbolic structures of Indigenous art — in the same way it had examined the comic-book panel and the Impressionist landscape — and left the question of what that examination costs open rather than resolved.

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