Painter, printmaker, and photographer Ben Shahn was born in Kaunas, current-day Lithuania, on September 12, 1898. His family emigrated to the U.S. in 1906 after his father, suspected of revolutionary activity, was exiled to Siberia. The Shahns settled in Brooklyn, NY, where, following high school graduation, Shahn trained in lithography and graphic design until he obtained master printer status. This afforded him the ability to enroll in biology courses at New York University in 1917. He soon realized he wanted to pursue art, however, and dropped out of NYU in 1919 to begin his formal art studies at the National Academy of Design, simultaneously taking classes at the Art Students League.

In 1925 Shan traveled to Paris to study at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, and lived there until 1929. Upon his return he focused on addressing American social conditions as the country fell into the Great Depression, sharing a studio with photographer Walker Evans who would introduce Shahn to the art of street photography. In addition to his own artistic output, he was employed by the WPA to design murals for buildings throughout New York, and posters for unions. Later, he was employed as a lithographer for the U.S. Office of War Information's propaganda department, which ultimately contributed to his anti-war stance. While Abstract Expressionism was de rigueur at the time, he preferred his own style of symbolism and social realism, and his art -- empathetic to the working man and the socially and politically persecuted -- was met with wider critical acclaim as the U.S. faced economic strife and war. He would continue to address sociopolitical issues for the remainder of his career. Among his most noted works was his series of twenty-three gouaches depicting the saga of Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants unfairly convicted of murder in New York and sentenced to death in 1927 despite worldwide protest. 

In addition to printmaking and painting, Shahn pursued photography as a means of expression and connection. He worked for the New Deal's Resettlement Administration helping families stuck in rural poverty establish new lives in government-planned communities, particularly in the American South. There he traveled with Dorothea Lange and Walker Evens, documenting the everyday experiences of the poor. Ultimately, his work, much like Lange's and Walker's, exposed the realities of the economically depressed, their living and working conditions, and helped to change policy as the country slowly recovered. 

Ben Shahn's first solo exhibition was held in 1930 at the Downtown Gallery in New York City, which would continue to represent him until his death in 1969. He regularly exhibited at the Whiteney Museum's biennials from 1932 to 1967; was included in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts' first annual exhibition in 1940, and all subsequent annuals thereafter until 1964; eight Corcoran Gallery biennials between 1941 and 1963; and was a representative of the U.S. in the Venice Biennial in 1954. Major retrospectives of his work were held at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) (1947-48), the Fogg Museum of Art (1956), and posthumously at the MOMA and the New Jersey State Museum. His estate was then represented by the Kennedy Galleries in New York City. 

Shahn died on March 14, 1969, in New York City.