Ed Clark was born on May 6, 1926 in the Storyville section of New Orleans and raised in Chicago. Clark is credited as the first painter to work on a shaped canvas, an innovation that influenced contemporary art through the 1950's and 1960's.

He is also known for his powerful brush strokes, large-scale canvases and especially his use of color. Yet another innovative move of Ed Clark is his use of the push broom method of working on paper with dry pigment. By 1953, he began exhibiting his abstract paintings.  He became engrossed in creating large scale paintings, reaching as high as twelve feet and as wide as fifteen feet.  Having little success finding paint brushes large enough to accommodate these large canvases he discovered a new use for the push broom which he calls, “the big sweep”.  During this time in Paris in 1956, Clark created what is now known as the “first shaped canvas” which is a part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 Clark is in over 15 solo exhibitions and a permanent collection in over 14 museums across the United States, Yugoslavia, Brazil and Mexico. Clark studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1947-1951 and L'Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris 1952.

Ed Clark passed away on October 18th, 2019 at the age of 93.