Stanley Whitney (b. 1946)
Stanley Whitney has experimented for decades with a single compositional strategy rendering grids with seemingly inexhaustible variations of color. He has described his process as similar to the call and response flow of traditional African American music, with one color calling forth another and dictating the structure of the work. Whitney draws inspiration from a wide range of historical and cultural references including Roman architecture, American quilt making, and jazz, which he listens to while working in the studio.
Since the mid-1970s, Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages. In the 1990s, now living and working in Rome, Whitney’s compostions shifted. It was Roman art and architecture—including the imposing façades of the Colosseum and the Palazzo Farnese and the stacked shelves of funerary urns on display at the Museo Nazionale Etrusco—that informed his nuanced understanding of the relationship between color and geometry. Honed over many years, his iconic motif is that of stacked compositions of numerous saturated color fields, delineated by between three to five horizontal rows running the length of the canvas or paper. The cumulative effect of Whitney’s multicolored palette is masterful in its pictorial balance. Taking his cues from early Minimalism, Color Field painters, jazz music and his favorite historical artists – Titian, Velázquez and Cézanne among them – Whitney is as much an exponent of the process-based, spatially-gridded square in art as Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Carl Andre. Experimental jazz—Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman—is Whitney’s soundtrack, its defining improvisational method yielding ever new energies to his process of painting.
Whitney studied at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving to New York City in 1968. He graduated with an MFA from Yale School of Art in 1972, but found himself at odds with the politically and theoretically oriented contemporary scene of the 1970s and 1980s, confronting the expectation that an African American artist should contend directly with themes of racial and cultural identity. Whitney was more interested in honing an abstract visual language, his early works incorporating patches of color surrounded by areas of empty space. At this stage in his career he was also focused on the power of gesture and immersed in the daily practice of drawing.
Stanley Whitney lives and works in New York City and Parma, Italy, and is currently Professor Emeritus of Painting and Drawing at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia. He has won prizes including the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is included in public collections including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Dance the Orange, a retrospective of his work, opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, in 2015; he has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including A.A.M. Architettura Arte Moderna, Rome (2004), and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2017). In 2017 he participated in Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, Germany