Born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, Rosenquist studied painting at the University of Minnesota with Cameron Booth. In 1955, he moved to New York having won a scholarship to the Art Students League, where he studied with Will Barnet, Edwin Dickinson and Robert Beverly Hale, among others. In 1957, he took a job painting billboards, working on scaffolds in Brooklyn and, a year later, high above Times Square. By 1960, Rosenquist had stopped painting commercial advertisements and rented a small studio space in Lower Manhattan where his neighbors included artists Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. During this period, Rosenquist, working against the prevailing tide of Abstract Expressionism, developed his own brand of New Realism—a style soon to be called Pop art. Rosenquist’s first solo exhibition at the Green Gallery in 1962 sold out and, in 1965, after working a year on the painting, Rosenquist exhibited his iconic fifty-nine panel F-111 at Leo Castelli Gallery. The 86 foot-long work, one of Rosenquist’s most explicitly political, is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In the 1970s, after a move to south Florida, Rosenquist began an ongoing series inspired by the vibrant tropical flora surrounding his studio. This interest in ecology develops in the artist’s Water Planet series of the late 1980s that pushes further into new modes of abstraction and addresses the fragility of life on earth. These themes are fully-realized in his Speed of Light (2000) and his Multiverse series (2011), in which Rosenquist expands his visual language into the extraterrestrial to present themes of perception and non-objectivity. Curator Sarah Bancroft has described this instinct as such: “The artist’s grand and global narratives comment on the failures and foibles of humankind. Yet the very fierceness of these critical commentaries convey a sense of hopeful optimism about the survival of humans, their colonies, and social environments."