Edward Flood graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and joined a group of artists who came to be known as the Imagists. Their work evoked surrealist art and elements of popular culture, and often employed vivid colors. Flood painted abstract shapes on glass panels, then layered these together to create fantasy scenes that resembled the inside of an aquarium. He moved to New York in the early 1970s and developed a series of relief sculptures from large pieces of wood and Masonite that he would bend into twisted, finlike shapes.