Frank Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. After graduating from Princeton University, he moved to New York and began his career with his renowned Black Paintings.  Precursors to Minimalism, these paintings garnered immediate recognition: four were included in MoMA’s Sixteen Americans 1959 exhibition, and one was purchased for their permanent collection.   

In 1960, Stella had his first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Throughout the 60s and 70s, he was included in major exhibitions defining art of that time at the Whitney, The Jewish Museum, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan and MoMA. In 1970, at the age of 34, Stella became the youngest artist to receive a full-scale retrospective at MoMA. In the 70s and 80s, Stella created important series such as the Brazilian and the Exotic Bird; in 1985, Stella began what came to be known as the Moby Dick series. Stella was given a second retrospective exhibition at MoMA in 1987, an act unprecedented for a living artist. 

The 1990s produced two major series: Imaginary Places and the Heinrich von Kleist series. One of his largest outdoor sculptures, Prince Frederick of Homburg, was completed and installed outdoors at the National Gallery of Art in 2001. In 2007, the Metropolitan exhibited Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture and Frank Stella on the Roof. His more recent work of the Near East series, the Bali series and the Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick series, Stella continues to work freely in three dimensions.

In 1983, he was appointed the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. In 1986, these lectures were published under the title Working Space.

Stella is the recipient of honorary degrees from Princeton, Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, Dartmouth College and the Friedrich Schiller University in Germany.  In 1989, he received the Ordre des Arts et des Letters from the French government. He was elected Honorary Royal Academician in 1993. In 2000, Stella was first American to have a dedicated gallery space within the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in London Stella was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2009. In 2012, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany exhibited a retrospective of Stella’s works. A retrospective of Mr. Stella works were exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art in 2015 and it traveled to Fort Worth and the de Young in San Francisco. The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin exhibited a retrospective of Mr. Stella’s work in prints in 2016 in conjunction with the publication of the revised and updated catalogue raisonne. The exhibition traveled to the Addison Gallery in Massachusetts and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama in 2017. Frank Stella: Experiment and Change opened at the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in November 2017. The Aldrich Museum’s Frank Stella’s Stars opened in 2020 with installation both in and outdoors. A survey of Mr. Stella’s were on view at the Museum Wiesbaden in Germany where he was awarded the Alexj von Jawlensky Prize in 2022.