Monroe was educated at The Boy's School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Museum School Art School (BMAS). Monroe trained further in painting at the renowned Art Students League and under the private tutelage of the seminal German- American painter Hans Hofmann. During his lifetime, Monroe exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN); the Oakland Museum (Oakland, CA); the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA,); the Pasadena Museum of Art (Pasadena, CA); the University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA); the University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley, CA); the University of Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA); and the Triton Museum of Art (Santa Clara, CA). His artwork resides in the permanent collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC); Kristiania University College (Oslo, Norway); the University of Agder (Grimstad, Norway); and the de Saisset Museum (Santa Clara, CA). His collected papers from 1950 - 2019 were acquired by the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art in 2019 and he will be the subject of a solo museum show in 2024.
