American Indian Theme II (C.161) is the most compositionally dense work in Roy Lichtenstein's American Indian Theme Series — a richly layered arrangement of symbolic forms in red, yellow, and black, the imagery drawn from the decorative traditions of Indigenous American art assembled into a picture of considerable intensity. The woodcut medium gave the work a physical texture absent from the screenprint and lithograph works of the preceding series, the grain of the wood block and the pressure of the printing process leaving their traces in the surface.

The sources for the American Indian Theme Series were not drawn from any single Indigenous tradition but from the broader landscape of Native American imagery as it had been represented in American popular and museum culture — in anthropological publications, museum collections, and the popular representations that had shaped mainstream understanding of Indigenous decorative art. Lichtenstein's attention was directed at this mediated representation as much as at the original sources — a characteristically Pop Art move, examining the image of a culture as it circulated in mass culture rather than seeking access to the culture directly.

American Indian Theme II (C.161) demonstrated the richness the woodcut medium allowed within the series' approach. The layering of forms — the interlocking geometric patterns, the symbolic figures, the dense fields of colour — produced a surface complexity the woodcut served particularly well, its physicality giving the picture a presence that the argument about appropriation and mediated representation required. This is the print in the series where that argument and the material properties of the medium are most fully aligned.

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