Stanley Whitney (b. 1946, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a leading American painter whose loosely gridded, densely colored canvases have expanded the language of contemporary abstraction, treating the grid not as a rigid structure but as something closer to a musical score.

Whitney earned his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1968 and an MFA from Yale in 1972, then moved to New York, where he spent the 1970s and 1980s in close dialogue with the city's jazz clubs and downtown scene, searching for a structure flexible enough to hold color without pinning it down, a question that occupied him for decades before his mature format arrived. In 1992 he and his wife, the painter Marina Adams, relocated to Rome for a period, folding Italian light and architecture into a practice already steeped in Mondrian, Morandi, and the improvisational logic of jazz and American quilting.

Since 2002, Whitney has organized loose blocks and bars of color into four irregular horizontal rows, uneven at their edges, varying in weight and size block to block, so that visible brushwork and small imprecisions keep the grid from ever reading as mechanical. The framework is fixed but the paintings never repeat: each one behaves like a musician working changes on a standard, the same underlying structure generating an entirely different composition every time. Whitney has long titled individual works after what he was reading or listening to while making them, such as Mingus and My Tina Turner.

In 2011 he was named the inaugural recipient of the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize, and has also received an Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His first-ever retrospective, Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon, its title drawn from Ella Fitzgerald's 1960 improvisation on the jazz standard, opened at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in 2024 before traveling to the Walker Art Center and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Now professor emeritus at Tyler, where he once commuted to teach, his work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery.