Stanley Whitney American, b. 1946

Stanley Whitney is a contemporary African-American artist known for his use of a loose grid of colors in his paintings. He has a wide range of references, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, jazz music, as well as the work of Bob Thompson and Giorgio Morandi. Whitney blocks out squares of color that complement and clash against one another, creating a quilt-like quality to the work. “I start at the top and work down. That gets into call and response,” he explained of his practice. “One color calls forth another. Color dictates the structure, not the other way around.” Born in Philadelphia, PA in 1946, Whitney studied at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving in New York in 1968. The artist went on to attend Yale School of Art, where he received an MFA in 1972. Not interested in making work specifically about his black identity, Whitney had a difficult time distinguishing himself during the 1970s and 1980s when painting abstractions was widely considered out of style. In 2015, the artist was the subject of the solo exhibition “Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange,” which was held at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He currently lives and works with his wife Marina Adams between New York, NY and Parma, Italy. Today, Whitney’s works are held in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, among others.