Carl Andre was born in 1935 in Quincy, Massachusetts. From 1951 to 1953 he attended the Phillips Academy, Andover, where he studied art under the mentorship of Patrick Morgan. In 1957 he moved to New York, where he started writing poetry and making drawings and abstract sculptures with geometric forms.

His most original contribution to the minimalist movement, according to the critic Edward Strickland, was the fact of “taking the removal of sculpture from the pedestal one step further, by conceiving of floor-level art more unconventional that even the columns, slabs, and boxes that had by then been placed on the floor without pedestal by Morris, Smith, and Judd”.