James Rosenquist essays

James Rosenquist essays James Rosenquist was born in 1933 in Grand Forks county, North Dakota in a hospital that is now known as the Happy Dragon Chinese Restaurant. His family moved from Grand Forks to Minneapolis in 1944. In 1948 he began his studies of art at the Minneapolis Art Institute and in 1953 he continued his studies of painting at the University of Minnesota. In 1955 Rosenquist applied for and received a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York. During this period he painted small format abstract paintings. By 1957 Rosenquist was sharing an Amsterdam Avenue space with Alice Forman, Jo Warner and Peggy Smith and had met Jasper Jones, Elsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, Anges Martin, Charles Hinman, Robert Indiana and Robert Rauschenberg. It was around this time that the Pop Art scene was beginning to jell. In 1958 Rosenquist landed a job painting billboards above Times Square, this would eventually influence his the giant size of his Pop Art experiments. In addition to painting billboards for Artkraft Strauss, Rosenquist, along with Johns and Rauschenberg, created windows for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany James Rosenquists first solo show was in 1962 at Greene Gallery, it was sold out. In the following year he exhibited his work at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, the Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles and taught at Yale University. The giant scale of his paintings made his work simply too big too ignore and people were enthralled by the powerful, new diversity of his images. In 1965 he made the legendary 26 metre-wide picture F-111. This particular piece contains images of, an angel food cake, tinned spaghetti, the words "U.S. Air Force," a nuclear explosion, a firestone tire, and others, all splashed across the length of an F-111 fighter plane. Often his images were inspired by advertising or other comm...