Born in 1933, North Dakota. Began studying at the Minneapolis Art Institute in 1948 and in 1953 continued at the University of Minnesota. In 1955 a scholarship led him to New York where he met Robert Indiana. During this time he painted small format abstract paintings and worked part-time as a driver. Met Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in 1957. During the American election of the time, he produced the picture President Elect in which John F. Kennedy's face is combined in a kind of collage with sex and automobile imagery.

His first one-man exhibition at the Green Gallery in 1962, sold out. He worked on several sculptures in 1963 and showed in Los Angeles and taught at Yale University. He began to work with lithographs in 1965 and in the same year made the 26 metre-wide picture, F-III which was shown at the Jewish Museum, New York and in Stockholm. It is one of his most significant works - a vision of American culture showing the proximity of euphoria and catastrophe.

In 1969 he turned his attention to experimenting with film techniques. During the public protest against the Vietnam War he was briefly detained in Washington. In 1974 and 1975 he lobbied the senate on the legal rights of artists. In 1978 F-III was exhibited in the International Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In his work of the late seventies and eighties, for example, 4 New Clear Women, images of women are combined with machine imagery, usually in large oblong compositions. The themes of these dynamic compositions also include fire, progress and war machinery, which he showed in rotating pictorial narratives.

Between 1985 and 1987 Rosenquist's development as an artist was depicted in a large retrospective at six American museums.