LEWISTON  — Twelve new silkscreened prints adapting lyrics from Bob Dylan’s groundbreaking song “Like a Rolling Stone” are among an exhibition by the acclaimed Maine artist Robert Indiana that opens with a reception at 7 p.m. Friday, June 10, at the Bates College Museum of Art.

The exhibition, “Robert Indiana: Now and Then,” marks the debut of Indiana’s latest series, the extraordinary “Like a Rolling Stone,” which merges the sensibilities of two of the definitive pop culture figures of the 1960s, Dylan and Indiana.

“Now and Then” spans the career of a seminal Pop artist whose image “LOVE,” with its signature tilted “O,” is one of the most recognizable works in American art. The show comprises more than 70 works representing such Indiana icons as “EAT,” “HOPE” and “THE ALPHABET.” The exhibition runs through Oct. 8.

Showing through the same period is “Jay Bolotin: The Book of Only Enoch,” an exhibition of prints by the profoundly inventive storyteller and artist Bolotin.

Also at the museum, through Aug. 27, is “David C. Driskell: The Doorway Portfolio,” comprising 12 silkscreens by Driskell and 12 hand-set letterpress pages of poetry by Michael Alpert.

Bates College Museum of Art events are always open to the public at no cost. The museum’s regular hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday (until 7:30 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays while Bates is in session). For more information, please contact 207-786-6158 or [email protected].

One of America’s foremost living Pop artists, Indiana is a longtime resident of Vinalhaven, an island off midcoast Maine. In addition to debuting the Dylan adaptions, the Bates exhibition showcases his versatility in rendering a given image on paper and canvas, in prints, and in three dimensions.

When Dan Mills, the director of the Bates museum, first encountered the “Rolling Stone” series, “I thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing — these are so powerful’,” he says.

“Much of Indiana’s work is about the continued exploration of variations on themes,” says Mills, and “Now and Then” will reflect that side of Indiana. But, says Mills, “in the Dylan works, each one is very distinct from the next.

“It’s an incredibly dynamic group as a result and I’m just really excited that we will be the institution that introduces these first to the world.”

One of the founding fathers of Pop Art, Indiana draws his subject matter from the visual vernacular such as commercial logos, road signs, and factory die-cut stencils, while incorporating the heritage of Modernists such as Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley. The well-known “LOVE,” conceived originally as a post card for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, has appeared as sculptures, paintings, drawings, and prints and as a U.S. postage stamp.

Indiana began the series about two and a half years ago, says Michael McKenzie, a longtime colleague of Indiana’s who curated the Bates exhibition and published the catalog for an earlier version of the show, “The Hope of Art.”

In the past, Indiana had based artworks on writings by Walt Whitman and others. McKenzie, thinking of a 2010 artist book that photographer Ed Ruscha had made from Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road,” suggested that Indiana return to literature for inspiration.

Dylan emerged as the natural choice of author. For decades, McKenzie says, Indiana routinely listened to Dylan in his studio. “I’d have to say that no musical artist has influenced me as much as Dylan, and probably no poet has influenced me as much as Dylan,” Indiana told McKenzie.

And just as Dylan was the natural choice for Indiana to adapt for his work, the most potent choice for a Dylan song was “Like a Rolling Stone,” an excoriating indictment of a precarious debutante that galvanized pop radio in 1966. (The song is said to be about Edie Sedgwick, one of the most prominent and tragic members of the circle around Andy Warhol in the 1960s.)

“The way Indiana has integrated Dylan’s lyrics — the few people who have seen the work, it has blown their minds,” McKenzie says. “We’re starting to realize this is a very important project.

“The significance is that you have the greatest shape poet of all time” — that is, someone whose poems take the shape of their subjects — “collaborating with the greatest rock poet of all time,” McKenzie says. “To see Robert Indiana figure out Bob Dylan was pretty intense.”

Born Robert Clark in 1928 in Newcastle, Ind., Indiana graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago, where his fellow students included Pop artists Claes Oldenberg and Red Grooms, and the Photorealist painter Richard Estes.

In 1956, he moved to New York City and became one of the six founding fathers of Pop Art. He moved to Vinalhaven in 1970. Indiana’s work is represented in more than 1,000 collections in 100 countries including the Bates College Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and The Louvre.

“Now and Then” is based on an exhibition organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions of Los Angeles, in association with American Image of Katonah, N.Y., and Rosenbaum Fine Arts of Boca Raton, Fla.