“I have to let the color take me wherever it takes me.” 

—Stanley Whitney 

In a career spanning over 50 years, Stanley Whitney’s captivating abstractions demonstrate his lifelong dedication to exploring the possibilities of color, structure, and form. Like improvisational jazz, there is rhythm in Whitney’s colors, each hue part of a call-and-response within his signature freeform grids.  

Harvard Art Museum’s Narayan Khandekar, curator of the one-of-a-kind Forbes Pigment Collection which includes over 3000 pigments from around the world, and Director of the Strauss Center for Conservation and Technical Studies has been equally dedicated to painting, its surfaces, and the study of color pigments in his field. 

In this conversation moderated by Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs Ruth Erickson, Whitney and Khandekar come together to reflect on their lifetime work, including Whitney’s five decades of painting represented in his retrospective, Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon.  

Make the most of your ICA visit! Explore the galleries and visit the ICA’s featured exhibition: Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon. Enjoy a drink and light bite in our waterfront Wine + Coffee Bar, featuring sommelier-selected natural wines and more. 

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

The exhibition is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator, Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The ICA/Boston’s presentation is organized by Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator.

With warmest thanks, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society in making the ICA’s presentation of this exhibition possible.