Contemporary artist Jerald Ieans was born in 1971 in Waukegan, Illinois. His artistic ability was evident at an early age. He studied art while attending Parkway Central High School and Florissant Valley Community College in St. Louis, Missouri. After a year and a half of college, Ieans chose to bypass traditional art school in favor of an independent approach; painting daily in his studio, reading about art, and visiting the Saint Louis Art Museum, where he studied their collection of modern and contemporary masters. Ieans participated in his first group exhibition in 1991 at the Utopian Loft Gallery, St. Louis, and by 1992 had his first solo exhibition at Schmidt Contemporary Art, St. Louis. By now, his distinctive style had already coalesced, and at the age of twenty-five, he became the youngest artist ever to be given a solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum in their Currents series. In 2001, Ieans’s paintings received national attention in Thelma Golden’s Freestyle exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and in the January 2002 issue of Artforum, Ieans was introduced by Robert Storr, Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, as a young artist who “shows special promise for the year ahead.” Ieans continues to live and work in St. Louis, Missouri.