American Indian Theme V (C.164) presented the most architecturally composed work in Roy Lichtenstein's American Indian Theme Series — a picture in which geometric forms and colour planes suggested the stepped and layered structures of Indigenous American architecture as much as the decorative and symbolic imagery that dominated the other works in the series. The horizontal organisation, with its rectilinear elements and clear spatial structure, gave the work a different character from the more densely symbolic surrounding prints.

The architectural dimension connected the series to the Entablature prints that Lichtenstein had produced four years earlier, in which the decorative conventions of classical Western architecture had been submitted to the same analytical treatment he was now directing at Indigenous American forms. The two series operated from the same methodological position — the examination of architectural and decorative systems as ornamental structures — but from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum, one drawing on the neoclassical tradition that had shaped American civic architecture, the other on the vernacular and ceremonial traditions of its Indigenous predecessors.

Lichtenstein made no explicit connection between the two series, but the logic driving them was identical. American Indian Theme V (C.164) was the work in the series where that parallel was most clearly visible — a picture whose geometric organisation and spatial clarity brought it closest to the Entablature prints while remaining firmly within the decorative territory of Indigenous American form.

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