Stack was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Catholic school. In 1970, she received a BFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and in 1972, an MFA from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Stack moved to Houston in 1973. Stack was honored with the Moores Professorship in 1999 and served as the Director of the University of Houston's school of art from 2004 to 2005. An artist whose work evokes both memory and the “gaps, sinkholes, and other chasms” found in our experiences, Stack is one of the most accomplished American painters working today. Her large canvases and smaller drawings use fragments of words and images, often layered over one another, to create a visual language that explores the past’s implacable hold on the present, with what is unknown and unspoken occasionally poking through.