Frank Stella (b. 1936, Malden, MA, 1936, d. 2024, New York) studied history and studio art at Princeton University. In 1959, when Stella was only twenty-three years old, his seminal Black Paintings appeared in Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Stella was included in such critical New York exhibitions as Geometric Abstraction (1962) at the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Shaped Canvas (1964–65) and Systemic Painting (1966), both at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1970, Stella became the youngest artist ever to receive a full-scale retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Stella participated in Documenta (1968, 1977), the Venice Biennale (1978), and the Whitney Biennial (1973, 1979, 1983). In 1987, the Museum of Modern Art held a second retrospective of his work, followed by major retrospectives at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2012) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015). Among his numerous honors, in 2009, Stella received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama.
