June 1 through September 29, 2024

Fowler Gallery
LEER EN ESPAÑOL

Stanley Whitney (American, b. 1946), Untitled, 2016, soft ground etching and spit bite aquatint. Allentown Art Museum: purchase, gift of Paul K. Kania, 2022. (2022.8.1.8)

Known for his exuberantly colored paintings, Stanley Whitney returns in this suite of black-and-white prints to the primacy of drawing in his work. Characterized by improvisational mark making, Whitney’s compositions contrast lyrically drawn and brushed lines against a structure of horizontal registers. While these freehand grids recall the blocks of Roman and Egyptian ruins that influenced the artist’s explorations of abstract space and density, their not-quite-geometric forms are filled with linear life.

Whitney notes that, having grown up in a Black community in Philadelphia in the 1950s, “music was everything.” He credits jazz as a key influence on his abstract compositions. In this series of prints—in tones of gray from ink black to paper white—Whitney seems to invite us to hold in our mind’s eye a multiplicity of absent but evoked colors and sounds.

Structure and Lyric: Prints by Stanley Whitney is supported through the generosity of the Bernard and Audrey Berman Foundation and the Leon C. and June W. Holt Endowment.

The exhibition Opening Preview Party is sponsored by


Image at top:
Stanley Whitney (American, b. 1946), Untitled (detail), 2016, sugar lift aquatint and open bite. Allentown Art Museum: purchase, gift of Paul K. Kania, 2022. (2022.8.1.1)