Stanley Whitney
Stanley Whitney’s abstract paintings and works on paper focus the possibilities of color and form, exploring and subverting the rules of the grid with color blocks and energetic gestural lines. Whitney’s influences range from the compositions of Titian and Velázquez to Minimalism, Color Field painting, Southern quilts, and the freewheeling jazz of Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman.
Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and 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.
Stanley Whitney has had solo exhibitions at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (2024), the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York (2015) and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2017). His works are included in the collections of many major museums, including those of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Right: Detail, Untitled, original lithograph by Stanley Whitney, 1985
