Born in 1926, in Pleasantville, NJ, painter Frank Wimberley studied with James Porter, Loïs Mailou Jones, and James Wells at Howard University. While a student, he also played jazz and later developed friendships with musicians such as Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, and Ron Carter in New York, who informed his creative sensibility. In Grass, Wimberley shows an early interest in political and social references in his torn paper collages, before his more characteristic abstract expressionist compositions.