The Buffalo AKG Art Museum announced Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon, the artist’s first career retrospective exhibition, which will open in the Buffalo AKG’s new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building on February 9, 2024. Organized by Cathleen Chaffee, the Buffalo AKG’s Charles Balbach Chief Curator, Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon traces the evolution of Whitney’s unique and powerful abstractions over the course of his fifty-year career. Following its presentation in Buffalo, the exhibition will travel to the Walker Art Center (November 15, 2024—March 16, 2025) and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (April 17, 2025—September 1, 2025).

 

“Stanley Whitney’s lifelong exploration of color has created an oeuvre of stunning inventiveness and rigor that evokes deep human emotion, beauty, and hope,” said Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator of the Buffalo AKG. “It has been one of the great honors of my career to work with Whitney on this, his long-overdue first retrospective. How High the Moon constitutes a historic moment not just for Whitney but also for the Buffalo AKG and the museums that will present the exhibition subsequently.”

 

“To have my work shown as the first large-scale special exhibition in the new Buffalo AKG Art Museum is a great honor,” said Stanley Whitney. “The Buffalo AKG’s painting collection is extraordinary, and it’s fabulous to have my retrospective in a museum that has supported and exhibited many of the artists who have been important to my development as a painter. I’m deeply grateful to Cathleen Chaffee and to the Buffalo AKG for their appreciation and understanding of my practice, and for the time and care they put into this exhibition. I’m excited to see the full span of my work for the first time in the stunning new Gundlach Building.”

 

“It is a profound honor to present Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon,” said Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director of the Buffalo AKG. “We are privileged to be the stewards of this career-spanning presentation of Whitney’s unparalleled artistic vision. I congratulate Whitney and Cathleen Chaffee on this momentous exhibition and extend heartfelt thanks to our partners at the Walker Art Center and the ICA/Boston.”

 

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon surveys Whitney’s extensive, career-spanning investigation of color. The exhibition features large canvases from throughout the artist’s career, including early gestural works such as Untitled, 1972, and his first large-scale oil paintings, including Sixteen Songs, 1984. In works such as Untitled, 1992, Whitney began grounding rounded forms of color in his paintings within a loose grid. Around 2002, this structure led Whitney to begin making the paintings for which he is best known today: square, richly colored, gridded abstractions, including Undestructable Hymn, 2001; James Brown Sacrifices to Apollo, 2008; Elephant Memory, 2014; and Stay Song 66, 2019. Endless Time, 2017, a painting from this later period that the Buffalo AKG acquired in 2017, will also be on view.

 

Whitney’s major paintings from 1972 to 2023 will be accompanied by extensive installations of the artist’s improvisatory small paintings; his drawings and prints, which constitute a vital, often overlooked element of his practice; and a chronological selection of the artist’s sketchbooks spanning from 1987 to 2021, which offer a view into his engagement with the written word as well as contemporary social and political issues. The exhibition contextualizes his work within the artist’s diverse sources of inspiration, including music, poetry, American quilts, and the history of art and architecture.

 

While the square-format, loosely gridded abstract canvases Whitney has made since 2002 have captivated viewers in recent years, these paintings are only one part of his career development. Between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, while making works characterized by a bold, experimental palette and unique rhythm, Whitney wrestled with the spatial legacies of foreground and background, and of object and field. His travels between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s—first to the American West, then to Italy, and finally to Egypt—transformed his work. Prior to this period, Whitney’s paintings of colored forms were suspended in what Whitney called “landscape air.” Afterward, inspired by the natural and built environments he encountered, he began grounding his paintings with a loose but ever-present framework of horizontal lines. In the decades since, Whitney has planned each painting around a fluid grid, allowing him to focus on endless and productive variations on the theme of color.

 

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon is the first large-scale special exhibition on the new campus of the Buffalo AKG after an inaugural installation in 2023 solely dedicated to the museum’s permanent collection. It comes after the Buffalo AKG presented Stanley Whitney: The Italian Paintings as a Collateral Event at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. Organized by Chaffee and Vincenzo de Bellis (then Curator and Associate Director of Programs at the Walker Art Center, now Director of Fairs and Exhibition Platforms for Art Basel) and presented at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, the exhibition gathered works that were exclusively created in Italy, where Whitney and his wife, the artist Marina Adams, maintain a studio.

 

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon is accompanied by a catalogue featuring new essays by Chaffee and host curators Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and Pavel S. Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. It also features texts by Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Norma Cole, a poet, 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 retrospective, a robust bibliography, an exhibition history, an illustrated chronology, and an extensive interview with the artist by Grégoire Lubineau and a conversation between Cole and Whitney.

 

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon was made possible through the generosity of Gagosian. This exhibition is also supported by a grant from the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation in honor of the Ellsworth Kelly Centennial. Additional support is provided by the Robert Lehman Foundation. The catalogue was produced with support from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.