Frank Stella was born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. Stella attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and later went on to paint and study history at Princeton University before moving to New York in 1958. Stella's talent was recognized early in his career with series such as the Black Paintings (1958-1960), in which bands of black paint separate pinstripes of unpainted canvas.
In 1959 Stella joined dealer Leo Castelli of New York, where he later had his first solo exhibition in 1962. Also in 1959, several of Stella's paintings were included in Three Young Americans, an exhibit at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, as well as in Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1960). Stella's work has been part of numerous retrospectives, his first in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He continues to be one of the most significant figures in minimalism and post-painterly abstraction today.
