On the occasion of ‘Jack Whitten. The Numinous’ on view at our Downtown Los Angeles gallery, please join us Saturday 24 October at 2 pm for a walkthrough and lecture with Director of the University of Kentucky Art Museum, Stuart Horodner.

After a studio fire in 1980 forced an extended pause, Whitten resumed artmaking with heightened urgency, his relentless technical ambition now inseparable from a fierce commitment to painting as spiritual transmission. This exhibition charts the breakthroughs of this pivotal period in the artist’s journey via the Soulspace paintings and circular acrylic reliefs that reference celestial navigation; the pixel-like grids on canvas that anticipate his tesserae works; and the Site paintings cast from such urban textures as manhole covers and tire treads, shown alongside frottage works on paper.

Together these reveal an artist whose utterly original transfiguration of abstraction—his integration of daring material invention with expressions of Black identity and animist spirituality—remains central to the history of postwar American art.

The program is free to attend, however, reservations are recommended. Click here to register. 

About Stuart Horodner 
Stuart Horodner is director of the University of Kentucky Art Museum. During the past thirty years, he has held positions as artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; visual arts curator at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; director of the Bucknell University Art Gallery; and co-owner of the Horodner Romley Gallery in NYC.

Horodner has curated numerous exhibitions and special projects with artists including Mel Chin, Leon Golub, Simone Leigh, Pope. L, Kay Rosen, Dana Schutz, Joe Sola, and Tony Tasset, among others. In 2008, he curated Jack Whitten: Memorial Paintings, the first exhibition to examine Whitten’s works honoring significant cultural figures, historical events, family members and friends.

His writing has appeared in periodicals including Art Issues, Art on Paper, Bomb, Dazed & Confused, and Sculpture. Horodner's book, "The Art Life: On Creativity and Career," was published in 2012, and addresses the philosophical and practical issues that affect artmaking and the marketplace.

Horodner received his BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, N.Y., and his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.