Skip to main contentBiographyTwo points are usually made in biographies about James Rosenquist (born 1933): he grew up under the big skies of the upper Midwest, and, early in his career he painted billboards. Both influenced the scale of his work. Born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, he moved with his family to Minnesota where his father worked on airplanes and at gas stations, which helps to explain Rosenquist’s lifelong love of planes, cars, and speed.
Encouraged by his mother, a sometime pilot and an amateur painter, he took Saturday classes at the Minneapolis Institute of Art as a teenager. In 1952, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota. During the summer, he worked for a commercial painting contractor and traveled extensively painting signs for Phillips 66 gas stations, grain elevators, and refineries. Two years later he graduated with an associate’s degree in art and following graduation he took a job painting billboards for General Outdoor Advertising.
In 1955, he was awarded a scholarship at the Art Students League in New York, where he studied for a year with Will Barnet, Edwin Dickinson, Sidney Dickinson, and George Grosz. To support himself, he worked odd jobs and painted billboards with the Artkraft Strauss Company. He frequented the hangouts of the leading Abstract Expressionists and associated with Willem deKooning and Franz Kline. By 1962, however, he rejected abstraction and emerged as a pivotal figure of the nascent Pop Art movement. His interaction with other up-and-coming artists such as Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns was solidified when he started using a loft at Coenties Slip, an area in lower Manhattan where several of those artists had already established studios.
With the acceleration of military activities in southeast Asia, Rosenquist became involved in the antiwar movement, and in 1965 completed his hallmark F-111, a huge, enveloping painting which juxtaposed images from aviation, magazines, food labels, and scenes of everyday life. In 1967, he moved his primary residence to East Hampton, New York, and in the 1970s began to work in Florida. In 1976, he established a studio in Arepika, Florida, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, in buildings the size of airplane hangers. There he worked on two murals for the Florida State Capitol. In addition to making prints with Tatyanna Grossman of Universal Limited Art Editions, Rosenquist became affiliated in 1971 with Graphicstudio at the College of Arts at the University of South Florida. [1]
Notes:
[1] See Walter Hopps, and Sarah Bancroft. James Rosenquist: A Retrospective. (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2003).
James Rosenquist
1933 - 2017
Encouraged by his mother, a sometime pilot and an amateur painter, he took Saturday classes at the Minneapolis Institute of Art as a teenager. In 1952, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota. During the summer, he worked for a commercial painting contractor and traveled extensively painting signs for Phillips 66 gas stations, grain elevators, and refineries. Two years later he graduated with an associate’s degree in art and following graduation he took a job painting billboards for General Outdoor Advertising.
In 1955, he was awarded a scholarship at the Art Students League in New York, where he studied for a year with Will Barnet, Edwin Dickinson, Sidney Dickinson, and George Grosz. To support himself, he worked odd jobs and painted billboards with the Artkraft Strauss Company. He frequented the hangouts of the leading Abstract Expressionists and associated with Willem deKooning and Franz Kline. By 1962, however, he rejected abstraction and emerged as a pivotal figure of the nascent Pop Art movement. His interaction with other up-and-coming artists such as Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns was solidified when he started using a loft at Coenties Slip, an area in lower Manhattan where several of those artists had already established studios.
With the acceleration of military activities in southeast Asia, Rosenquist became involved in the antiwar movement, and in 1965 completed his hallmark F-111, a huge, enveloping painting which juxtaposed images from aviation, magazines, food labels, and scenes of everyday life. In 1967, he moved his primary residence to East Hampton, New York, and in the 1970s began to work in Florida. In 1976, he established a studio in Arepika, Florida, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, in buildings the size of airplane hangers. There he worked on two murals for the Florida State Capitol. In addition to making prints with Tatyanna Grossman of Universal Limited Art Editions, Rosenquist became affiliated in 1971 with Graphicstudio at the College of Arts at the University of South Florida. [1]
Notes:
[1] See Walter Hopps, and Sarah Bancroft. James Rosenquist: A Retrospective. (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2003).
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