Born in Ponoma, California, in 1907, Millard Sheets was a Californian who specialized in depicting the West Coast urban poor in such famous paintings as his Tenement Flats (probably the most significant painting executed in California in the 1930s) currently in the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.  His particular use of light and color distinguished him from his East Coast contemporaries.

Sheets attended the Los Angeles School of Art as the pupil of F.T. Chamberlain and Clarence Hinkle.  After graduating in 1929, he had his first solo exhibition at Dalzell Hatfield Galleries in Los Angeles.  Sheets was the director of exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Fair from 1931 to 1959.

Sheets served as a war artist for Life magazine, covering the Burma-India front from 1943 to 1944. Upon his return to California, he executed mosaic murals throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

In addition, Sheets executed the architectural design for many buildings, illustrated for national magazines, and handled production design for Columbia Pictures.  During this time, he served as director of Arts at Scripps College, in Claremont, California.

Sheets saw his work as a synthesis of Cubism and Impressionism.  He traveled throughout Europe, Central America, Mexico, the United States, the Pacific and the Orient, but continued to live permanently in Gualala, California.