Robert Cottingham was born in 1935 in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the Pratt Institute in New York and began his career working in graphic design, a choice which later provided inspiration for his iconic paintings of American signage. He moved to Los Angeles in 1964 to work in advertising and after four years, he quit to focus on art full-time. Cottingham had his first solo show in New York at the O.K. Harris Gallery in 1971, and went on to have many one-man exhibitions in America and Europe, notably at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut, the Springfield Art Museum in Missouri, the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio and the Louis K. Meisel Gallery in New York, among others. His work is included in the collections of the Arkansas Art Center; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia; the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.