Stanley Whitney (b. 1946) is an American artist who is most known for his vibrant, large scale gridded paintings. Whitney was born in Philadelphia and studied at Kansas City Art Institute, developing a friendship with artist Philip Guston. He subsequently moved to New York in 1968 and matriculated at the Yale School of Art, where he received his MFA in 1972.
While his abstract paintings were compositionally more organic earlier in his career, a period spent living in Rome, in the 1990s, lead to the more geometric, gridded approach for which his later work is known. Whitney draws inspiration from elements of Black culture, especially jazz. He describes his process as call and response, where he works top to bottom, having each layer and aspect feed into and inspire the next.
Whitney is currently Professor Emeritus of Painting and Drawing at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. The artist lives and works in New York, spending his summers in Parma, Italy.
Whitney’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions including Stanley Whitney: By the Love of Those Unloved, Gagosian Gallery in New York (2024), Stanley Whitney: The Italian Paintings, Venice, an official event associated with the 59th Venice Biennale, presented by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (2022); FOCUS: Stanley Whitney, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2017); and Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange, the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York (2015). His work has also been included in group exhibitions, including documenta 14, Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany (2017); Outside the Lines: Black in the Abstract, Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2014); and Utopia Station at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). His works reside in major public collections, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.