‘Living in the Plains, you’d see surreal things; you’d see mirages. I’m sitting on the front porch, as a little kid at sunset, and the sun is in back of me, and walking across the horizon is a Trojan horse four stories tall. I go “Uh oh—what’s that?” So I run into the house and say, “Look! Look at the big horse!” It was the neighbor’s white stallion, which had got loose, caught the light in the heat, and it looked four stories tall. These kinds of little things make, I think, the curiosity, or the inquisitiveness, that make and artist.’
-James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist was born in 1933 in Grand Forks, North Dakota. He won a short-term scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art and subsequently studied painting at the University of Minnesota from 1952 to 1954. In 1955, he moved to New York City on scholarship to study at the Art Students League. Rosenquist has received honors including the ‘Art In America Young Talent USA’ distinction in 1963, appointment to a six-year term on the Board of the National Council of the Arts in 1978, and the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in 1988. Major solo exhibitions of Rosenquist’s work have been held at the Miami Art Museum, the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and Bilbao and the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Rosenquist is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
American, 1933 - 2017, Grand Forks, North Dakota, based in Aripeka, Florida.