While other Pop artists focused on the brand logos and commodities of consumerism, George Segal was largely interested in examining how people functioned within the fabric of consumer culture, exploring the psychology of postwar American life. Rather than work with traditional casting methods, Segal developed a new process in making his sculptures, dipping orthopedic bandages in plaster to create life-sized, three-dimensional casts of his models. While his plaster casts took on existential qualities, providing a window onto the human condition, he also situated these sculptures in three-dimensional environments suggestive of familiar, everyday spaces.

Growing up in the Great Depression, Segal spent most of his childhood in the Bronx of New York City. When he was in high school, his family moved out to New Jersey and purchased a chicken farm with a group of other Jewish families. After finishing high school, Segal would work on his family’s farm during the day and attend night classes at Rutgers University. In 1946, Segal married his neighbor Helen and together they purchased their own chicken farm in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where they would live for the rest of their lives.

During this period, Helen supported Segal in his pursuit of studying art while he attended the Pratt Institute and took art classes at New York University, completing his degree in arts education in 1949. At this time, Segal formed friendships with Rutgers University professors as well as people active in the New York art scene, such as the composer John Cage and artist Allan Kaprow. Segal would invite this assemblage of people to an annual picnic out at his farm, an occasion which inspired Kaprow to coin the term “Happening.” In 1958, while continuing to work on the chicken farm, Segal also began painting figurative works, but he was soon frustrated with the way painting expressed his ideas. As he later stated:

“My paintings were dissatisfying me intensely because I'd been listening to everybody's ideas about painting, you know, keep it flat, don't make holes in it, you know, implied two versus three-dimensional psychological tension, you know, like you read—you looked at them two dimensionally but you read them three dimensionally. So I said, what the hell? You know? Why should I read them? Why couldn't they be three dimensional if you were talking about that?”

This frustration ultimately led to a transition from painting to sculpture. After completing an MFA at Rutgers in 1963, he began teaching there and explored new forms of expression. Developing a new technique in 1960, using plaster bandages he received from a medical student, Segal began casting sculptures with his subjects inside. His first trial involved Helen wrapping his own body, as well as the chair he was sitting on, in wet plaster bandages. After the bandages dried, he reassembled all the pieces and replastered them to create a sculpture. He then began asking family and friends to model for these early plaster sculptures. The characters, white and ghostly, frequently convey expressions of boredom and stiffness, likely due to sitting for extended periods of time. Due to the plaster medium, there is little surface detail, which intensifies their seemingly blank anonymity. Adding elements and props, he created scenes from everyday life, adding references to pop culture in his sculptural tableaux. Situating his whitewashed figures at lunch counters or waiting at street corners, he captured their body language as his models participated in familiar activities, as they went about their days in everyday life.