Carl Andre is considered a forefather of American Minimalism. His extensive work, including sculptures and public artworks, revolved around placing and sorting quotidian materials like bricks, plates, and blocks. Andre moved to New York in 1956 and shortly thereafter, he befriended Constantin Brancusi through former classmates Hollis Frampton and Frank Stella, and began working on the Pennsylvania Railroad—influences that inspired his attachment to working class ideals, order, and factory-finished materials. In the 1960s, his adoration of linear formats led him to explore concrete poetry and text works. Andre’s use of the grid reduced his work to the quality of his materials and their role in his realization of an idea, often dependent upon and specific to the environment in which they were originally installed. He believed in sculpture as place, “an area within which an environment has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous.” 

Andre has exhibited extensively both abroad and in America. He has had solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, Detroit Institute of the Arts, Michigan, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, to name a few. His work has been featured in group shows at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Tate Gallery, London, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and MoMA PS 1, New York, among many others. He participated in dOCUMENTA 4 (1968) and 7 (1982) in Kassel, Germany, the 10th Biennale Tokyo, and the Venice Biennale in 1978. His career catapulted after his inclusion in Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in 1966. Andre was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984, and the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation Prize in 2011. He was a founding member and participant in the Art Workers Coalition between 1969 and 1971.