James Rosenquist

Born in 1933 in Grand Fork, North Dakota, Rosenquist spent his summers painting billboards while he studied at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and he University of Minnesota. He left school after one year and moved to New York, where he became a commercial artist once again, painting billboards in Times Square. In the early 1960’s, Rosenquist participated in a series of exhibitions that helped define Pop Art. Experimenting with the large scale he used as a billboard painter, Rosenquist achieved international fame with his room-sized painting, F-111. The surreal Technicolor multipanel painting incorporates images of a light bulb, a child’s eerily smiling head, a fighter jet and a mushroom cloud . In 1992, he took it a step further with his print, Time Dust, measuring seven feet by thirty-five feet, though to be the largest print in the world.