Frank Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he attended Princeton University, where he majored in history.
After graduating, Stella moved to New York in 1958. From 1958 to 1960, he shared a studio space with photographer Hollis Frampton and sculptor Carl Andre, who said of their relationship, "we educate each other." A brief marriage to celebrated art critic Barbara Rose sparked the 1965 show Shape and Structure, one of the earliest exhibitions of Minimal art, curated with the MET's Henry Geldzahler.
He began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something, be it something in the physical world, or something in the artist's emotional world. This was a departure from the technique of creating a painting by first making a sketch. Many of the works are created by simply using the path of the brush stroke. Stella is heralded for creating abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting.
Before the artist's 25th birthday, Stella's work was featured in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1970, the museum presented his first retrospective at MoMA when he was just 34—far younger than many artists to have received the same honor. Stella's work is included in major international collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Portland Art Museum, OR. In 2009, Frank Stella was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center.
Stella is one of the most well-regarded Post-War American painters still working; today, in his eighties, he lives in downtown Manhattan, keeping a studio in upstate New York.