Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon

This career-spanning volume accompanies Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon, the artist’s first museum retrospective, which featured 170 paintings and works on paper—from large-scale oil paintings to small improvised drawings and sketchbook pages—produced from the 1970s to the present. The exhibition originated at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York, subsequently traveling to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. It contextualized Whitney’s practice in relation to both his artistic community and his influences—from the history of art and architecture to quilting, textiles, and jazz.

The book includes essays by exhibition curator Cathleen Chaffee and host curators Ruth Erickson and Pavel S. Pyś, as well as texts by curator Kim Conaty; poet, painter, and translator Norma Cole; and fashion designer and curator Duro Olowu. These in-depth commentaries survey Whitney’s gridded compositions of the past two decades alongside historical assessments of his practice; they also discuss the development of his works on paper, his relationship with the written word, and the influences of music, poetry, and quilting on his practice. Color reproductions of all the works in the exhibition are accompanied by a bibliography, an exhibition history, an illustrated chronology, an extensive interview with the artist by Grégoire Lubineau, and a conversation between Cole and Whitney.