22 Facts About James Rosenquist

James Albert Rosenquist was an American artist and one of the proponents of the pop art movement.

James Rosenquist was a 2001 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.

James Rosenquist was born on November 29,1933, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, the only child of Louis and Ruth James Rosenquist.

James Rosenquist's parents were amateur pilots of Swedish descent who moved from town to town to look for work, finally settling in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

James Rosenquist's mother, who was a painter, encouraged her son to have an artistic interest.

In junior high school, James Rosenquist 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.

James Rosenquist started by painting Phillips 66 signs, going to gas stations from North Dakota to Wisconsin.

From 1957 to 1960, James Rosenquist earned his living as a billboard painter.

James Rosenquist applied sign-painting techniques to the large-scale paintings he began creating in 1960.

James Rosenquist had his first two solo exhibitions at the Green Gallery in 1962 and 1963.

James Rosenquist exhibited his painting F-111, a room-scale painting, at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1965, with which he achieved international acclaim.

In 1971 James Rosenquist came to South Florida after receiving an offer from Donald Saff, dean of the University of South Florida's College of Fine Arts, to participate in the school's Graphicstudio, a collaborative art initiative.

James Rosenquist would continue to travel to Florida throughout his career with the artist developing several commissioned works for the community including two murals for Florida's state capitol building and a sculpture for Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, in addition to serving on the Tampa Museum of Art's Board of Trustees.

James Rosenquist's paintings have been on display in the lobby of Key Tower in Cleveland, Ohio.

Zone: A key work in the development of his signature style, James Rosenquist cites his 1961 work Zone as a turning point in the development of his own personal aesthetic, with the piece being the first to employ monumental scale, a recurring aspect of James Rosenquist's art that is exemplified in his many murals.

James Rosenquist uses icons in pop culture to examine fame and the relationship between advertising and the consumer, exploring the kind of fame and iconography that comes with American politics.

F-111: In 1965, James Rosenquist completed F-111, one of the largest and most ambitious works in his collection.

James Rosenquist uses the painting to question the role of marketing and coverage of the war describing the plane as "flying through the flak of consumer society to question the collusion between the Vietnam death machine, consumerism, the media, and advertising,".

James Rosenquist received numerous honors, including selection as "Art In America Young Talent USA" in 1963, appointment to a six-year term on the Board of the National Council of the Arts in 1978, and receiving the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in 1988.

James Rosenquist's F-111, shown at The Jewish Museum in 1965, was mentioned in a chapter of Polaroids from the Dead by Douglas Coupland.

James Rosenquist died at his home in New York City on March 31,2017, after a long illness; he was 83 years old.

James Rosenquist's survivors include his wife, Thompson; one daughter, Lily; one son, John; and a grandson, Oscar.