Frederick Lane Sandback was born August 29, 1943, in Bronxville, New York. He attended the Williston Academy (now Williston Northampton School) in Easthampton, Massachusetts, from 1957 to 1961, followed by a year of studies at the Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium in Heilbronn, West Germany. As a teenager, Sandback developed an interest in chordophone music and began making stringed instruments such as dulcimers and banjos. He was skilled in carving, kayaking, and climbing, and also built longbows and became a practiced archer. Music, strings, and the outdoors played consistent roles throughout his life and greatly influenced his art. Sandback received a BA and BFA from Yale College, New Haven, where he majored in philosophy and sculpture from 1962 to 1967. He completed an MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1969. This same year he moved to New York. As an outdoors enthusiast he also spent much of his time in Rindge, New Hampshire, where he eventually kept a studio on his family's property. Sandback's sculptures, made by tightly securing thin lines of material to floors and walls, define outer perimeters of geometric forms across large interior spaces. While he most often worked with colored acrylic yarn, he used steel wire, elastic, and rope in some of his earlier sculptures. Sandback also practiced printmaking, made text-based work, and created small wood bas-reliefs and drawings with knives on mat board. Sandback's first solo exhibitions were in Germany in 1968, although Donald Judd, one of his teachers at Yale, hosted a presentation of the artist's work in his own New York studio this same year. In 1969 Sandback had premiere solo shows in New York and Los Angeles; participated in three seminal Conceptual-art museum exhibitions; and had his first solo museum show at Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany. His New York solo debut at Dwan Gallery doubled as his MFA thesis show for Yale. Sandback was awarded a Fine Arts Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1976 and two years later he had concurrent solo museum exhibitions in New York at the Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. In 1981 the Dia Art Foundation, New York, sponsored the opening of the Fred Sandback Museum. Located in a former bank in Winchendon, Massachusetts, the space was selected specifically to accommodate the scale and spatial needs of Sandback's sculptures and sculpture series. Sandback closed the museum in 1996. In 1985, the same year that the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, Illinois, hosted a retrospective of his work, Sandback, continuing his love for the outdoors and world traveling, ventured to the North Pole on an expedition led by Sir Edmund Hillary. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he had several solo museum shows in Europe and the United States, including exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (1989), and Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall (1991). He had a solo exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1996), and presented his work at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas (2001). Before his death in 2003, Sandback completed a permanent installation at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, New York. His first major posthumous retrospective was organized by the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz; it traveled Europe from 2005 to 2006. The first major U.S. retrospective of Sandback's work was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2009).