Stanley Whitney with Tom McGlynn

Artist Stanley Whitney and Tom McGlynn, Arts Editor at the Brooklyn Rail discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.

Stanley Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and lives and works in New York City and Parma, Italy. He holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute as well as an MFA from Yale University and is currently Professor emeritus of painting and drawing at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of colour within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. His current motif, honed over many years, is the stacked composition of numerous saturated colour fields, delineated by between three to five horizontal bands running the length of a square-formatted canvas. The cumulative effect of Whitney’s multicoloured palette is not only one of masterly pictorial balance and a sense of continuum with other works in this ongoing series, but also that of fizzing, formal sensations caused by internal conflicts and resolutions within each painting. Taking his cues from early Minimalism, Color Field painters, jazz music and his favourite historical artists – Titian, Velázquez and Cézanne among them – Whitney is as much an exponent of the process-based, spatially-gridded square in art as Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Carl Andre. Read more.

Stanley Whitney in the Rail:

• Stanley Whitney: In the Color, by Tom McGlynn
• Stanley Whitney with Phong Bui
• Stanley Whitney with John Yau
• Stanley Whitney (Breathing Sound), by John Yau
• Stanley Whitney: Other Colors I Forget
• Stanley Whitney and Lorraine O’Grady
• Stanley Whitney: Untitled ‘10, by Craig Olson
• Stanley Whitney: Sketchbook, by Megan N. Liberty

Tom McGlynn is an artist, writer, and independent curator based in the N.Y.C. area. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian. He is the director of Beautiful Fields, an organization dedicated to socially-engaged curatorial projects, and is also currently a visiting lecturer at Parsons/the New School.

Tom McGlynn in the Rail.

The New Social Environment — Daily conversations with artists, writers, filmmakers, poets around the world where we discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.