California-based painter, curator, and art writer and critic, James "Jim" Monte studied at the Art League of California, the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, Paris, and the College of Marin, CA. He was an associate editor at Art Forum magazine throughout the 1960s and '70s, and was Director of Exhibitions at the San Francisco Art Intitute from 1966-'67, Assistant Curator of Modern Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1967-'68, and in 1969 he moved to New York to work as curator for the Whitney Museum, where he remained until 1975. Among his contributions to the American art scene was the presentation with fellow Whitney curator Marsha Tucker of the first Post-Minimalist show in an American museum, the Whitney, titled "Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials", 1969. He exhibited paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the group exhibition "Color as Color and Field, April, 1986.

He died in California on October 12, 2013.