Painter, sculptor, and printmaker Stanley Boxer was born on June 26, 1926, in New York City. After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he enrolled in art classes at the Art Students League on the G.I. Bill, studying under Morris Kantor. He then began a full-time career as a painter, working seven days a week in his Manhattan studio. In 1950 he and artist Ara Klausner opened the Perdalma Gallery at 110 East 57th Street, where Boxer held his first solo show in 1953. 

Boxer began exhibiting frequently in the mid 1960s, with shows throughout the US, Canada, and Europe. At this time he also began working in sculpture and was given a show of his wood and marble works at the Rose Fried Gallery in 1968. Later, he would add bronze sculpture to his dimensional repertoire, creating a series of hand-painted bronze multiples at the Garner Tullis Workshop in Santa Barbara, CA, in 1984.

In 1971 he gained representation by the Tibor De Nagy Gallery, a professional relationship he would maintain through 1990, and In 1975 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, allowing him to study inaglio printmaking with Kenneth Tyler at Tyler Graphics, Ltd., in Beford Village, New York. There, in 1976, he published his first portfolio of color intaglios, Ring of Dust in Bloom. He would go on to publish another portfolio at Tyler Graphics in 1979, titled Carnival of Animals; thereafter, printmaking would become an increasingly regular medium in Boxer's artistic oeuvre. In 1980 he traveled to San Francisco to take a course in monotype printmaking at the Institute of Experimental Printmaking in San Francisco, CA, where he published a suite of monotypes in 1983. 

Among his noted exhibitions are a retrospective of his drawings at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina (1978); L'Amerique aux independants: quatre-vingt-onzieme exposition des artistes, Grand Palais, Paris (1980); Stanley Boxer: Two California Projects, Santa Cruz Art Musum, Santa Cruz, CA, 1987; The Unique Print: 70s into 80s, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, 1990; Masters of Contemporary Printmaking, Associated American Artists, New York, NY (1991); 45 Years Retrospective: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints, Rose Art Gallery, Brandais University, Waltham, MA (1992); Center for the Contemporary Graphic Art & Tyler Graphics Archive Collection, traveling exhibition, Fukushima, Japan (1995); 20th Century Figurative Drawings from the Mint Museum Collection, Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC (1999). Ultimately, Boxer's prolific exhibiting career spanned over over forty decades and innumerable shows.

Boxer earned several awards and recognitions for his work in addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship, including a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship Grant (1989); elected Associate Member of the National Academy of Design in 1992 and elected Full Member in 1993; a Print Club of New York Print Commission (1997), and a posthumous Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement & Contribution to the Cultural Life of Columbia County (2004). His work is included in museums and private and public collections throughout the U.S. and beyond.

Stanley Robert Boxer died on May 9, 2000, in Pittsfield, MA.