John Walker was born in Birmingham, England in 1939. He studied at Birmingham School of Art (1956-1960), and continued his studies at The British School at Rome from (1960-1961), and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, France (1961-1963).

John Walker was a Gregory Fellow at Leeds University (1967-1969). He was awarded a Harkness Fellowship to the United States (1969–70) and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981. He has been artist-in-residence at Oxford University (1977–78), and at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia (1980).

He represented England at the 1972 Venice Biennale.

He has taught at the Royal College in London and at Yale University. In the 1980’s he was Dean of Victoria College of Art in Melbourne, Australia. From 1993 to 2015, he taught at Boston University and is currently Professor Emeritus of Art and former head of the graduate program in Painting and Sculpture at Boston University School of Visual Arts.

He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; The Tate Gallery in London, England; The Hayward Gallery in London, England; The Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany; The Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia; and others.

His work can be found in museum collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Gallery, Edinburgh; Tate Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.

John Walker resides and works in Boston, Massachusetts and in South Bristol, Maine.