Johns was born in 1930 at Augusta, Georgia and grew up in South Carolina. After the end of the Second World War he was drafted into the army and stationed in Japan. Between 1949 and 1951 he studied at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. From 1952 to 1958 he worked in a bookshop in New York. He also did display work with Robert Rauschenberg for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany. In 1954 he painted his first flag picture. He had his first one-man exhibition in 1958 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. He was represented at the Venice Biennale during the same year. His picture Grey Numbers also won the International Prize at the Pittsburgh Biennale. In 1959 he took part with Rauschenberg in Allan Kaprow's Happening Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts. He was included in the collective exhibition Sixteen Americans in the same year at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1960 he began working with lithographs. In 1961 he did his first large map picture and travelled to Paris for an exhibition at the Galerie Rive Droite. In 1964 he was given a comprehensive retrospective at the Jewish Museum, New York. The catalog included texts by John Cage and Alan Solomon. He was represented at the Venice Biennale in the same year. In 1965 he had a retrospective at the Passadena Art Museum, organized by Walter Hopps. During the same year he saw a Duchamp exhibition and won a prize at the 6th International Exhibition of Graphic Art, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. In 1966 he had a one-man exhibition of drawings at the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington. In 1967 he rented a loft in Canal Street and painted Harlem Light using a tile motif. He also illustrated Frank O'Hara's book of poems In Memory of My Feelings. He was Artistic Adviser for the composer John Cage and Merce Cunningham's Dance Company until 1972, collaborating with Robert Morris, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Bruce Naumann. In that year he was represented at the documenta "4", Kassel, designed costumes for Merce Cunningham's Walkaround Time and spent seven weeks at the printers Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. In 1973 he met Samuel Beckett in Paris and collaborated with him on a book, Foirades/Fizzles. He was given a comprehensive retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1977, shown in 1978 at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, Hayward Gallery, London, and Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo. He was represented at the Venice Biennale in 1978. In 1979 the Kunstmuseum Basle put on an exhibition of his graphic work which toured Europe. In 1988 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale. In 1996 the Museum of Modern Art presented the exhibition Jasper Johns: A Retrospective. (Based on the biography at WWW.PopArt).

In a 1972 artforum (June 1972) interview with Jeanne Siegel that took place shortly before the opening of his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Rosenquist commented, "The imagery was expendable to me but it was the color and texture that I was interested in, for instance, if I thought I felt like painting red I might have painted a great big tomato." When Jeanne Siegel observed, "Nevertheless, certain images are recurrent, for example body fragments -particularly hands, automobiles, and food," James Rosenquist said, "Hands for me have always been sort of an offering, a suggestion saying two cents off, buy this, try a new steam iron. They had to do with advertising, and advertising, as I said before, was like the power on the street that a lot of money was poured into, to make something bright and flashy, to make something go. And that was a powerful gesture that people would recognize, so if I put them in a painting, they would see them and they couldn't mistake them for a crucifix because it would be a hand offering something. I used that imagery so it wouldn't be mistaken for something else. As for automobiles and car parts, I was brought up with automobiles in the Midwest and I used to know the names of all of them. I came here and spent some time in New York and I didn't know anything that was stylish. I found myself standing on the corner, and things going by, and I couldn't recognize anything and that wasn't only automobiles. There were a lot of other things and I began to feel that what was precious to my thing was what I could remember."

Johns' art has long been featured at galleries and museums; the Guggenheim has announced that its first exhibit in its newly-reconstructed exhibition spaces will be a James Rosenquist Retrospective in Fall 2002. Rosenquist's works are in the permanent collections of such museums as the Guggenheim Museums in NY, Bilbao, and Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Chicago Art Institute, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Detroit Institute of Art, USC Annenberg School for Communication. Rosenquist's art has long been featured at galleries and museums; the Guggenheim has announced that its first exhibit in its newly-reconstructed exhibition spaces will be a James Rosenquist Retrospective in Fall 2002.

Selected Bibliography: Elizabeth Armstrong, ed., Jasper Johns: Printed Symbols (Minneapolis,: Walker Art Center, 1990); Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns, Foirades/Fizzles (NY: Petersburg Press, 1976); Roberta Bernstein, Jasper Johns’ Paintings and Sculptures 1954—1974: "The Changing Focus of the Eye" (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985—Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 1975); Roberta Bernstein, Jasper Johns (NY: Rizzoli, 1992); Barbara Bertozzi, ‘The Seasons; Jasper Johns/’Le Stagioni’ di Jasper Johns (Milan: EdizioniCharta, 1996); Georges Boudaille, Jasper Johns (Paris: Albin Michel /NY: Rizzoli, 1989); Michel Butor, Comment écrire pour Jasper Johns (Paris: Editions La Différence, 1992); Riva Castleman, Jasper Johns: Lithographs (NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970); Riva Castleman, Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 1986); Jean-Luc Chalumeau, Découvrons l’art du XXe siècle: Jasper Johns (Paris: Editions du Cercle d’art, 1995); Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns (NY: Abrams / the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994); ames Cuno (ed.), Jasper Johns, Samuel Beckett, Edith A. Tonelli, John Cage, Richard S. Field, Andrew Bush, Richard Shiff, and Fred Orton, Foirades/Fizzles: Echo and Allusion in the Art of Jasper Johns (Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1987); Richard S. Field, The Prints of Jasper Johns: 1960—1993, A Catalogue Raisonne (West Islip, N.Y.: Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc., 1970, rpt. 1994); Richard S. Field, Jasper Johns: Prints 1970—1977 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978); Ruth E. Fine and Nan Rosenthal, The Drawings of Jasper Johns (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990); Richard Francis, Jasper Johns Drawings (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974); Richard Francis, Jasper Johns (NY: Abbeville, 1984); Christian Geelhaar, Jasper Johns: Working Proofs (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, 1979); Judith Goldman, Foirades/Fizzles (NY: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1977); Judith Goldman, Jasper Johns: Prints 1977—1981; The Complete Works (Boston: Thomas Segal Gallery, 1981); Judith Goldman, Jasper Johns: 17 Monotypes (West Islip, N.Y.: Universal Limited Art Editions, 1982); Judith Goldman, Jasper Johns: L'Oeuvre graphique de 1960 à 1985 (Saint-Paul-de-Vence: Fondation Maeght, 1986); Carlo Huber, ed., Jasper Johns Graphik (Bern: Klipstein und Kornfeld, 1971); Jill Johnston, Jasper Johns: Privileged Information (NY: Thames and Hudston, 1997); Dieter Koepplin, Jasper Johns: Progressive Proofs zur Lithographie Voice 2 und Druckgraphik 1960—1988 (Basel: Kunstmuseum, Basel 1989); Max Kozloff, Jasper Johns (NY: Abrams, 1969); John Palmer Leeper, Jasper Johns: The Graphic Work (San Antonio, Tex.: Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, 1969); Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Mark Rosenthal, Jasper Johns: Work since 1974 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988); David Shapiro, Jasper Johns Drawings: 1954—1984 (NY: Abrams, 1984); Alan R. Solomon, Jasper Johns (NY: The Jewish Museum, 1964); Alan R. Solomon and Bryan Robertson, Jasper Johns: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture 1954—1964 (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1964); Leo Steinberg, Jasper Johns (NY: George Wittenborn, 1963); David Sylvester, Jasper Johns (Stockholm: Heland Wetterling Gallery, 1991); Kirk Varnedoe, ed. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 1996); Kirk Varnedoe and Christel Hollevoet, eds. Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews (NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 1996); David Whitney, Jasper Johns (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, 1978); David Whitney, with David White Jasper Johns (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978); John Yau, The United States of Jasper Johns (Cambridge: Zoland Books, 1996).