James Rosenquist (1933-2017) was a pivotal figure in post-war American art, making his mark as a founding member of the Pop art movement. Rosenquist drew inspiration from his experience as a billboard painter, sourcing images from advertisements, photographs, and popular magazines, and reassembling them into striking and enigmatic compositions. He employed the visual language of advertising, which the late curator Walter Hopps described as "visual poetry," to explore themes ranging from economics and romance to ecology, science, and existentialism. Over his five-decade career, Rosenquist demonstrated exceptional skill in painting, collage, drawing, and printmaking, continuously producing groundbreaking work. Rosenquist was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and studied painting at the University of Minnesota under Cameron Booth. After winning a scholarship to the Art Students League, he moved to New York, where he studied with notable artists such as Will Barnet, Edwin Dickinson, and Robert Beverly Hale. By 24 years old, he was painting billboards in Brooklyn and Times Square. Rosenquist then left commercial advertising to focus on his art, establishing a studio in Lower Manhattan near artists like Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. During this period, he developed his distinctive style of New Realism, which would become known as Pop art.

James Rosenquist's work is included in major collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. His art is also part of the he Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Denver Art Museum, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Tate Gallery, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Moderna Museet, among others.