Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon

On November 14, the Walker Art Center will open Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon, the artist’s 50-year career retrospective and the first exhibition to explore and contextualize the full depth and range of Whitney’s practice. The expansive presentation charts Whitney’s career-long engagement with abstraction, from early works characterized by bold experimental palettes and a dynamic sense of rhythm, produced in the 1970s and 1980s, through to his current celebrated large-scale paintings that examine variations of color within the confines of a fluid grid.

How High the Moon will remain on view at the Walker through March 16, 2025. The exhibition is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, the Charles Balbach Chief Curator at Buffalo AKG. At the Walker, the presentation is being coordinated by Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy, with Laurel Rand-Lewis, the Walker’s Curatorial Fellow in Visual Arts. How High the Moon is accompanied by a major catalogue that further illuminates Whitney’s groundbreaking work and career.

Whitney grew up in a house filled with music and knew from an early age that he wanted to be an artist. After completing his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute, he arrived in New York City in 1968, focused on developing an abstract visual language that emphasized rhythmic explorations of color. His early paintings featured bursts of color within large swaths of empty space–color forms suspended in what he has referred to as “landscape air.” Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Whitney continued to experiment with the relationships between color and gesture. Despite a range of innovations and breakthroughs, Whitney found himself on the outside of an art world that expected him to create work that spoke directly to his racial and cultural identity. Frustrated by the dynamics of New York’s art scene, Whitney and his wife, the artist Marina Adams, moved to Italy in 1992. Here, Whitney—inspired in particular by the façades of the Colosseum and the Palazzo Farnese as well as the stacked shelves of funerary urns on display at Volterra’s National Etruscan Museum—began shifting from the amorphous openness of his earlier work to examinations of color within stricter geometries.

In 2002, at the age of 56, Whitney arrived at what would become his mature style. His square-format abstract paintings feature variations of color within a loose grid. The structure of the grid provides infinite opportunity to explore the visual and emotive impact of both subtle and bold shifts in color, as Whitney plays with opacity, transparency, and the rhythmic tension between the blocks of color and the grid within which they exist. How High the Moon features a broad selection of these acclaimed paintings as well as important examples of works that capture the full arc of Whitney’s career.

“The Walker is thrilled to present How High the Moon, a retrospective that surveys Whitney’s lifelong commitment to abstraction,” said Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy. “Vibrant, bold, and brimming with color, the exhibition reminds us of the depth possibilities of abstract art—in capturing our attention, inspiring and expressing profound feeling, and provoking reflection on the indispensable role of art in everyday life.”