Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle was born in 1961 in Madrid. He received BA degrees in art and art history and Latin American and Spanish literature from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1983 and an MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. His early work was oriented toward collaborations with urban communities and resulted in the founding of Street-Level Youth Media, a community arts organization for Chicago youth. His subsequent projects have incorporated a variety of mediums. Tires suspended from a gallery ceiling in Flotilla (1991) make reference to illegal immigration to the United States. Assigned Identities (1991) comprises images of ID cards in which some details are concealed and others revealed. The sculptural works Subwoofer (1995) and Bloom (1995–96) incorporate unorthodox materials such as car sound systems and firearms. The video trilogy Le Baiser/The Kiss (1999), Climate (2000), and In Ordinary Time (2001) critique the Modernist architecture of Mies van der Rohe. In recent sculpture—such as Cloud Prototype No. 1 (2003), a gargantuan, cloudlike metallic form—Manglano-Ovalle has experimented with spectacular scale. For Phantom Truck, presented at Documenta 12 in 2007, he created a physical manifestation of the biological weapons lab described by Colin Powell before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which during the war was reassessed and deemed incapable of manufacturing said weapons.