Alex Katz (b. 1927) studied at The Cooper Union in New York and at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. In 1994, The Cooper Union endowed the Alex Katz Visiting Chair in Painting, and in 2000, honored the artist with its "Artist of the City" award. The Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Art of Alex Katz at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, presents exhibitions of its in-depth collection of Katz's paintings, cut-outs, drawings, and prints.

Alex Katz's work has been the subject of nearly 200 solo exhibitions internationally since 1954. In the Summer of 2003, the first European exhibition devoted solely to the artist's celebrated portraits opened at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice. An exhibition of the artist's aluminum cut-outs opened at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 2003 and traveled to the Museum Moderner Kunst Kaernten, Klagenfurt, Austria.

Major exhibitions of Katz's landscape and portrait painting in America and Europe followed his 1986 Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective and 1988 print retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. These exhibitions include: Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (1995), Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia (1996), P.S. 1/Institute for Contemporary Art, New York (1997-1998), the Saatchi Gallery, London (1998), Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento (1999), and Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (2002).

Alex Katz's work can be found in numerous public collections worldwide. Those in America include: Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Des Moines Art Center; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Additionally, Katz's work can be found in the Albertine Graphische Sammelung (Austria), the Atenium Taidemuso (Finland), the Bayerische Museum (Germany), the Berardo Collection (Portugal), the Essl Collection (Austria), the French National Collection, the Israel Museum, IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez (Spain), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Japan), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Spain), the Nationalgalerie (Germany), the Saatchi Collection (England), and the Tate Gallery (England), among others.