African American artist Stanley K. Whitney was born in 1946 in Philadelphia, and he attended the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio, in 1966. He earned a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1968 and an MFA from Yale University in New Haven in 1972. He is an admirer of the painters Diego Velázquez and Paul Cézanne. Additionally, jazz music is among his sources of inspiration, similar to the African American artist and educator Russell T. Gordon, who was inspired by the jazz musician Thelonious Monk; the African American photographer Gerald Cyrus, who was influenced by jazz and blues artists; and the improvisational styles of the African American artists Quentin Morris and John E. Dowell Jr. He has been quoted explaining, “Music was always there for me as a kind of rhythm—getting in rhythm, having rhythm. People sometimes find my paintings odd because of the rhythm.”[1] Whitney lives and works in New York City and eastern Long Island, New York, and is a professor emeritus of painting and drawing at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Notes
[1] Whitney, quoted in Neri 2020.
References
Lisson Gallery. n.d. “Stanley Whitney.” Accessed June 28, 2022. https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/stanley-whitney.
Lisson Gallery. n.d. “Stanley Whitney CV.” Accessed June 28, 2022. https://lisson-art.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/attachment/file/body/23780/Stanley_Whitney_CV.pdf.
Neri, Louise. 2020. “The Space Is in the Color.” Gagosian Quarterly, April 10, 2020, https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2020/04/10/interview-space-is-in-the-color-stanley-whitney-louise-neri/#:~:text=People%20sometimes%20find%20my%20paintings,it%20from%20any%20one%20spot.
Sotheby’s, New York. 2022. “Untitled.” In Contemporary Curated, March 11, 2022, sale N10910, lot 103. https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2022/contemporary-curated-5/untitled-10.
Sturgis, Daniel. 2016. “Stanley Whitney.” In Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting, edited by Tom Melick and Rebecca Morrill, 324–25. New York: Phaidon.
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