Ben Birillo is a painter and sculptor best known for masterminding the groundbreaking Pop art exhibition, "The American Supermarket," widely considered to be the world’s first major exhibition of Pop art. A contemporary and colleague of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Artschwager, Tom Wesselmann, and Claes Oldenburg, newspapers nicknamed Birillo the “Progenitor of Pop” and “Mr. Pop Art” due to his energetic promotion of the Pop art movement.