John Wesley was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1928. After high school he held a variety of jobs, while studying at UCLA in the evening until he started working as illustrator in the Production Engineering Department at Northrop Aircraft in 1953. In this period he begins to paint regularly and to think about art. His work was first exhibited in a group show at the Exodus Gallery in San Pedro, California in 1958.
His first solo show was in the Robert Elkon Gallery in New York in 1963. In late spring of the same year, Wesley exhibited 8 paintings in the Washington Gallery of Modern Art 'The Popular Image' exhibition, a show that included most of the artists later considered the core of the Pop Art movement.
Since then he has had over fifty solo exhibitions, including eight museum shows at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2000), Fogg Art Museum, Harvard (2001), and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1993), among others. In 2006 the Armory Show in New York commissioned him to create the image of that year's fair. Other recent exhibitions include a retrospective of his paintings on paper at Krefeld Kunstmuseum in Krefeld, Germany (2005). A permanent collection of his work was installed at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, in 2004.
Wesley has been granted a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976), and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1989). In 2006 Wesley was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Artistic Achievement in Painting from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.