Robert Morris was a preeminent American Conceptual artist regarded as one of the early proponents of Minimalism. In one of his best-known series, Morris hung sculpted pieces of dense felt on the wall, the resulting drooping shape, acted as a challenge to painting while offering a new format for sculpture. “There's information and there's the object; there's the sensing of it; there's the thinking that connects to process,” he once explained. “It's on different levels. And I like using those different levels.” Born on February 9, 1931 in Kansas City, MO, he studied sculpture at Hunter College in New York and graduated in 1963. One of his works from this era, Steam (1967), consisted of a cloud of steam continuously rising from a large block of rocks, and is regarded as an early example of Land Art. Also an accomplished writer and theorist, he wrote a seminal essay outlining the basis of Minimalism titled Notes on Sculpture, first published in Artforum in 1966. Morris has been the subject of many solo exhibitions, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970 and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1994. The artist died in November 2018 in upstate New York from pneumonia at the age of 87. Today, his works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.