Allan D'Arcangelo was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1930. After finishing his studies in art history, he went on to the City College and the School of Social Research in New York in 1953. Then he studied art for two years at Mexico City College under John Golding from 1957 and showed work for the first time in 1958. Allan D'Arcangelo taught at numerous art colleges, including the New York School of Visual Arts and Brooklyn College as well as the Institute of Humanistic Studies in Aspen, until well into the 1970s. As a representative of Pop art, Allan D'Arcangelo became famous for his 'Highway' pictures from 1963. In them he used crisply outlined forms and vibrant colours to describe the American highway as reflecting the way drivers experience a landscape shaped by traffic lights and road signs. From the mid-1960s Allan D'Arcangelo introduced realistically rendered fences or barricades into pictures that were otherwise increasingly tending towards abstraction and, from the 1980s also incorporated oil tanks and jets. Allan D'Arcangelo's work was represented by three portfolios, '11 Pop Artists', at the Philip Morris International, which made Pop art world-famous in the 1960s. Official recognition soon came to Allan D'Arcangelo; in the 1960s and 1970s he was awarded several distinctions by the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies and the National Institute of Arts as well as the 1970 Letters Annual Award. In addition, Allan D'Arcangelo was a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists and City Walls Incorporated. From the 1960s Allan D'Arcangelo's work was shown internationally. Allan D'Arcangelo died in New York in 1998.