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Born 1936 Malden, Massachusetts
Collage Component, undated
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For nearly four decades, Frank Stella has been a beacon of artistic audaciousness, experiment and change. In 1958, during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, Stella's monochromatic pinstripe paintings, which heralded the assault of the Minimalist movement, sent an electric shock through an intellectually complacent art scene. He followed these with multicolored, shaped canvases, then exploded the painting surface altogether in a riot of French curves, metallic glitter and Dayglo color. His current work defies easy definition as it gleefully embraces the tenets of painting, sculpture, collage, architecture and engineering.
Since his museum debut in Sixteen Americans (1959) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Stella's work has been exhibited regularly around the world. He has been honored with two retrospectives at MoMA (1970 and 1987) and with surveys at such major venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; the Fort Worth Museum of Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; the Kunstmuseum, Basel; the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; and the Knoedler Gallery, London. Stella's restless creativity has led him to design projects as diverse as sets and costumes for Merce Cunningham's dance Scramble, stained glass windows for a projected building by Philip Johnson, tapestries in Edinburgh and London, a BMW race car and the Dresden Kunsthalle and Garden Project, consisting of models for five buildings and an orangery. In 1983, Stella was named the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. His Norton lectures were published in 1986 under the title Working Space.
Stella is the first recipient of the Robert Gwathmey Chair in Art and Architecture at The Cooper Union.
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