Lawrence Weiner was born in Manhattan in 1942 and raised in the South Bronx, and lived and worked between New York City and Amsterdam. Weiner has been the subject of a major retrospective survey at the Whitney Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2007-2009). Other retrospectives have been shown at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico (2004); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2000); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA (1994); and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA (1990). Solo exhibitions include the Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2021); Fundación Casa Wabi, Oaxaca, Mexico (2020); Museo Nivola, Orani, Italy (2019); Milwaukee Art Museum (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2016); Blenheim Art Foundation, United Kingdom (2015); South London Gallery, United Kingdom (2014); Villa Panza, Italy, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2013); and the Jewish Museum, New York (2012). Weiner participated in Documenta 5, 6, 7, and 13 (1972, 1977, 1982, 2012); the 36th, 41st, 50th and 55th Venice Biennales, Italy (1972, 1984, 2003, 2013); and the 27th Biennale de Sao Paulo, Brazil (2006).

The artist was the recipient of major honors, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1983), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1995), a Skowhegan Medal for Painting/Conceptual Art (1999), an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the Graduate Center, CUNY (2013), the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation Prize (2015), and the Wolf Prize and the Aspen Award for Art (2017).