Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1929 and grew up in Chicago. He attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut where he concentrated on English and art. In the early 1950s he worked in Chicago as an apprentice police reporter for the City News Bureau before studying art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Oldenburg became a citizen of the United States in December 1953. He moved to New York in 1956, settling in the then gritty neighborhood of the Lower East Side, where he created the object-filled environments of The Street (1960) and The Store (1961), as well as performances called Happenings, which led to his being hailed as the inventor of Pop art. The artist went on to work with everyday objects such as fans, ice cream cones, and hamburgers, transforming them into giant soft sculptures. In the mid-1960s he began work on what he called Proposed Colossal Monuments, which soon led to his work on actual monuments.