Longlati Foundation in Shanghai announces inaugural exhibition featuring Judy Chicago and Stanley Whitney

30 October 2020

Longlati Foundation, a Shanghai-based private non-profit organization with the mission to collect and exhibit art that reflects the changing discourses of art history, has today announced its inaugural exhibition of recently acquired works by Judy Chicago and Stanley Whitney from the Foundation’s collection. 'Call and Response' will be on view at West Bund Art & Design fair Hall B from 11 – 15 November. The exhibition precedes the Foundation’s opening of its permanent space in Shanghai in spring 2021 and marks both artists’ first major exhibition in China.

The exhibition will highlight Judy Chicago’s work from the 1960s to the 1980s, including EU 22 Earth Birth, a monumental textile-based work from her “Birth Project” series, which was created in collaboration with more than 150 volunteer artisans and sought to replace masculine archetypes with symbols of female empowerment, freedom and connectivity. The exhibition will also highlight Stanley Whitney’s abstract compositions of stacked and saturated color fields, including Listening to the Poets (pictured), one of the largest paintings created by the artist to date. Whitney’s Untitled (No to Prison Life) – part of a new series of works on paper by the artist that premiered in a special online exhibition in July to coincide with World Day for International Justice on July 17, 2020 – will be on view to the public for the first time. The statement, “No to Prison Life” is the artist’s protest against the U.S. judicial system's promotion of arrest, incarceration, and other forms of imprisonment, in particular highlighting the disproportionate number of Black Americans in U.S. prisons.

Curator Wenjie Sun notes: “This exhibition of works by Judy Chicago and Stanley Whitney explores the ways in which each artist’s unique creative processes influence how their work has evolved over time. Chicago’s work celebrates human connection. Her artistic process is both improvisational and fluid, organically evolving from concept to creation. Improvisation plays an equally important role in Whitney’s work, who uses color as an expressive language rather than a means of constricting form; it is the interrelationships between the blocks of color in his works that determine the structure and form of his compositions.”

Find out more about 'Call and Response' and the Longlati Foundation here.