A leader in the hard-edged, geometric abstractionist movement that arose in the U.S. and Europe in the late 1950s, Edwin Mieczkowski is regarded as one of the earliest proponents of Optical Art, a style that rivaled Abstract Expressionism for dominance in the mid-1960s.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1929, he received his BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1957 and his MFA from Carnegie Mellon in 1959. He taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art for 39 years, even while maintaining a home and studio for a number of years in New York City.

Together with Frank Hewitt and Ernst Benkert, he formed an artist group called Anonima. Sharing studio space in New York and other locations, they followed a rigorous, self-imposed program of painting exercises to explore the effects of color, brightness and form on visual perception, prefiguring and becoming part of the Op Art movement.