Robert Whitman (born 1935 in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

) is an American

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, the ...

best known for his seminal theater pieces of the early 1960s combining visual and sound images, actors, film, slides, and evocative props in environments of his own making. Since the late 1960s he has worked with new technologies, and his most recent work incorporates cellphones.

Background

Whitman studied literature at

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

from 1953 to 1957 and

art history Art history is the study of aesthetic objects and visual expression in historical and stylistic context. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today, ...

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in 1958. He is represented by The

Pace Gallery The Pace Gallery is an American contemporary and modern art gallery with 9 locations worldwide. It was founded in Boston by Arne Glimcher in 1960. His son, Marc Glimcher, is now president and CEO. Pace Gallery operates in New York, London, Hong ...

in New York.

Theater works

He was a member of the group of visual artists -

Allan Kaprow Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 – April 5, 2006) was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the " Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well a ...

, Red Grooms, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg - who in the early 1960s presented

theater Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The perform ...

pieces on the

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Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

. Whitman has presented more than 40 theater pieces in the United States and abroad, including ''American Moon'', ''E.G. and Mouth'' at the Rueben Gallery. ''Night Time Sky'' was his contribution to the First New York Theater Rally in New York in 1965; ''Prune Flat'' was first presented at the Cinematheque in New York in 1965 and has been performed numerous times since. In 1966, Whitman was one of the 10 New York artists who worked with Billy Klüver and more than 30 engineers and scientists from

Bell Telephone Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

to create works that incorporated new technology for '' 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering'', a series of

performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

works presented October 13–23 in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in

. For this piece, ''Two Holes of Water- 3'', Whitman used seven automobiles on the floor of the Armory, from which were projected film, over-the-air television programs, and closed-circuit television projections of live performances and actions, including images from one of the first fiber-optic miniature video cameras. A retrospective, ''Robert Whitman: Theater Works, 1960–1976'' held in 1976 sponsored by the

Dia Art Foundation Dia Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization that initiates, supports, presents, and preserves art projects. It was established in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, the daughter of Houston arts patron Dominique de Menil and an heiress to the Schlu ...

and presented six earlier works and the premiere of ''Light Touch''. His theater works have been presented at Galerie Maeght Festival in France, Contemporary Arts Museum,

Houston Houston (; ) is the List of cities in Texas by population, most populous city in Texas, the Southern United States#Major cities, most populous city in the Southern United States, the List of United States cities by population, fourth-most pop ...

, Texas,

Moderna Museet Moderna Museet ("the Museum of Modern Art"), Stockholm, Sweden, is a state museum for modern and contemporary art located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, opened in 1958. In 2009, the museum opened a new branch in Malmö in ...

Stockholm Stockholm () is the capital and largest city of Sweden as well as the largest urban area in Scandinavia. Approximately 980,000 people live in the municipality, with 1.6 million in the urban area, and 2.4 million in the metropol ...

;

Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the United States and, t ...

, Vera List Art Center, MIT and many more. ''Ghost'', his most recent theater performance, was staged at PaceWildenstein Gallery in New York City in 2002. In 2003,

, New York presented, ''Playback,'' a large-scale retrospective exhibition of Whitman’s works. The exhibition traveled to Porto, Portugal, and opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in September 2005. A major book, ''Playback'', a comprehensive study of his work, accompanies this exhibition. In the fall of 2004, Whitman presented a theater performance, ''Antenna'', in

Leeds Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by popula ...

, England, sponsored by Lumens, as part of the New Media Festival there.

Sculpture and installations

He has collaborated with engineers on installations and works that incorporate new technology: laser sculptures, including ''Solid Red Line'', in which a red line draws itself around the walls of a room and then erases itself; ''Pon'', a sound-activated metallized PET film mirror installation shown at The Jewish Museum in New York in 1969. His long collaboration with optics scientist John Forkner began with a mirror, light and sound installation for the ''Art and Technology'' exhibition at the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...

in 1971. They developed an optical system that allowed real images to float in space, to appear and disappear in an environment made up of a wall array of 6-inch corner reflectors in which the visitors saw multiple images of themselves. Whitman was one of the co-founders of Experiments in Art and Technology along with engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artist

Robert Rauschenberg Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines (1954–1964), a group of artwor ...

- a project to provide contemporary artists with access to new technology as it developed in research institutions and laboratories. Whitman was one of the core artists for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70,

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Japan, a project administered by E.A.T. One of the main features of the interior of the Pavilion was the central performance space in a 90 ft diameter 120 degree spherical mirror made of aluminized reflective PET film, which produced real images of the visitors hanging upside down in space. Significant one-person exhibitions of Whitman's sculpture and installation pieces include shows at The

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of th ...

in New York, The Hudson River Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm. Whitman has had one person gallery exhibitions at PaceWildenstein in New York, and has been included in many group exhibitions.

Telecommunications projects

Whitman, working with Experiments in Art and Technology, E.A.T., in the early 1970s, developed and participated in a number of innovative communications projects : - Anand Project: he was part of an interdisciplinary team to develop methods for instructional television programming for rural Indian villages; - Children and Communications, open environments for children to work with a variety of communication equipment; - Telex: Q&A: a worldwide person-to-person question and answer opportunity using telex equipment in New York, Stockholm, Ahmedabad, India, and Tokyo; - Artists and Television, artists’ programming on New York cable channels. In 1972, Whitman produced his first telephone piece, NEWS, in which participants, using pay phones, called in reports which were broadcast live over radio station WBAI. NEWS was performed later in Houston, Minneapolis, and other cities over a two- or three-year period. A later performance in Leeds, England in 2002, utilized cell phones, and the calls were broadcast in real time on large speakers in a public square in the town. A recording of the performance was made available by the sponsor, Lumens, at Ubuweb. In the summer of 2005, Whitman presented ''Local Report'', a video cell phone project.

Awards

Whitman has received many awards:

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

(1976); Creative Artists Public Service Grant; Citation of Fine Arts, Brandeis University; Creative Arts Award Xerox Company Grant.

External links