One of the first artists specifically associated with minimalism was the painter Frank Stella, four of whose early “black paintings” were included in the 1959 show, 16 Americans, organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The width of the stripes in Frank Stellas’s black paintings was often determined by the dimensions of the lumber he used for stretchers to support the canvas, visible against the canvas as the depth of the painting when viewed from the side. Stella’s decisions about structures on the front surface of the canvas were therefore not entirely subjective but pre-conditioned by a “given” feature of the physical construction of the support.