Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon
Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
April 17 - September 1, 2025
The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon. The ICA/Boston is the last stop for this major touring survey, which traces the development of Stanley Whitney’s unique and powerful abstractions over his 50-year career. The exhibition includes over 100 works, featuring extensive installations of the artist’s improvisatory small paintings; drawings and prints; and a selection of his sketchbooks spanning from 1987 to 2021, offering a view into Stanley Whitney’s endless variations on the theme of color, form, and his engagement with the written word.
“Like the 1940 song, penned by Nancy Hamilton and Morgan Lewis, that inspired the exhibition’s title, Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon conveys feelings of enchantment through the artist’s consistent yet wholly expansive paintings,” said Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA. “Whitney’s abstractions create a space for viewers focus on their wide-ranging responses to color, rather than a specific subject.”
This exhibition places Stanley Whitney’s color-saturated paintings in the context of his diverse sources of inspiration, which include jazz and soul music, poetry, American quilting traditions, and global histories of art and architecture. Between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, while making works characterized by a bold, experimental palette and unique rhythm, Stanley Whitney wrestled with the spatial legacies of foreground and background, and of object and field. His travels through the American West, Italy, and Egypt in the mid-1980s and the early 1990s transformed his work. Prior this period, Whitney’s paintings of colorful forms were suspended in what Stanley Whitney called “landscape air.” In the decades since, inspired by the natural and built environments he encountered, including Egyptian Pyramids and the Roman Colosseum, he began grounding his paintings with the loose but ever-present framework featuring horizontal rows of alternately askant and ordered squares, resulting in the loosely gridded abstractions that capture the imagination of audiences today.
Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon surveys Stanley Whitney’s extensive investigation of color at the true height of his career. The survey features the artist’s large-scale explorations of color alongside his improvisatory small paintings. His drawings and prints provide vital, and often overlooked, context to the artist’s practice. These smaller works are exhibited alongside a chronological selection of the artist’s sketchbooks spanning from 1987 to 2021 to provide a view into Stanley Whitney’s engagement with the written word, and contemporary social and political issues.
Exhibition Catalogue
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, 2024
This career retrospective is accompanied by a catalogue featuring new essays by Cathleen Chaffee and host curators Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA, and Pavel S. Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. It also features texts by Kim Conaty, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Normal Cole, a poet, designer, painter, and translator; and Duro Olowu, a London-based fashion designer and curator. These examinations of and reflections on the arc of Whitney’s career are presented alongside full-color reproductions of the works featured in the exhibition, a robust bibliography, an exhibition history, an illustrated chronology, and an extensive interview with the artist by Grégoire Lubineau and a conversation between Normal Cole and Stanley Whitney.
Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The ICA’s presentation is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator.
ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART - BOSTON
25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210
Related Post:
Stanley Whitney: Dance With Me Henri, Baltimore Museum of Art, November 20, 2022 - April 23, 2023
