The Artist's Voice: Stanley Whitney | with Jennie C. Jones and Lauren Haynes

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On the occasion of Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange, we are thrilled to present this artist talk in which Stanley Whitney will be joined by Jennie C. Jones, an artist whose audio collages, paintings, sculptures and works on paper explore the formal and conceptual connections between modernist abstraction and Black avant-garde music. Together, they will consider particularities of Black abstraction, and discuss how African-American artists working outside of figurative modes are often essentialized through quantitative rather than qualitative language. Whitney and Jones will ask questions of each other's practices, while also exploring shared references and interests, including a mutual investigation of the language of jazz. Lauren Haynes, Associate Curator, Permanent Collection, will moderate the conversation and it will conclude with a question-and-answer segment and walkthrough of the exhibition.

Stanley Whitney (born Philadelphia, 1946) is a painter whose intensely color-based abstractions have won steadily mounting recognition since the mid-1990s. Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange features twenty-eight paintings and works on paper created between 2008 and 2015, including the 2013 title work. Following time spent in Italy and then later in Egypt in the mid-1990s, Whitney developed the weighty, almost architectural approach that has now become his signature style. Rhythmic and lyrical, with a combination of pre-ordained structure and improvisation inspired in part by his love of jazz, the square-format paintings arrange rectangles of vivid, single colors in a deliberately irregular grid, with the close-fitting, many-hued “bricks” or “tiles” stacked vertically and arrayed in horizontal bands.

Jennie C. Jones (born Cincinnati, 1968) attended Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts, where she received her MFA in 1996. Prior to that she attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving a BFA in 1991, with Fellowship. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at major art institutions including the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2009), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2011), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington DC (2013). A ten-year survey exhibition of her work, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, will open at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in December 2015. A book published by Gregory R. Miller will accompany the exhibition. Jones is the recipient of a number of awards including a Pollock-Krasner Grant (2000), Creative Capital Grant (2008), the William H. Johnson Prize (2008), and The Studio Museum in Harlem's Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2012). Her work in the collection of the Deutsche Bank, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Museum of Modern Art in New York. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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