James Little in the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

(Artist James Little with three of his five paintings in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Image courtesy James Little and Kavi Gupta.)

2022 Whitney Biennial artist James Little (b. 1952) is an American abstract artist whose distinctive aesthetic language is rooted in geometric shapes and patterns, flat surfaces, and emotive color relationships. Little utilizes a method similar to the encaustic painting technique used by ancient Egyptian and Greek artists, blending handmade pigments with hot beeswax.

Little has been an enduring and influential force in the field of abstraction for decades. Included in such pivotal early exhibitions as Another Generation: Contemporary Abstractionists at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979, and Afro-American Abstraction at MoMA PS1 in 1980, Little has consistently re-defined the meaning and importance of abstract painting in the Postmodern age. His distinctive aesthetic language is rooted in geometric shapes and patterns, flat surfaces, and emotive color relationships. While developing his unique position within contemporary abstraction, Little has devoted decades to rigorous academic study of color theory, pictorial design, and painting techniques. His practice embodies the complementary forces of simplicity and complexity.

Little holds a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art and an MFA from Syracuse University. He is a 2009 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painting. In addition to being featured prominently in the 2022 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, his work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including at MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO; and the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC. Recently, Little's work has been thrilling audiences in such groundbreaking exhibitions asDirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, and The Shape of Abstraction: Selections from the Ollie Collection at the Saint Louis Museum, Saint Louis, MO. In November of 2022, he will open an ambitious solo exhibition of new large-scale paintings at Kavi Gupta in Chicago.

His paintings are represented in the collections of numerous public and private collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; DeMenil Collection in Houston, Texas; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Maatschappij Arti Et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Holland; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse NY; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ; Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, TN; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR; and Newark Museum, Newark, NJ.

Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept (April 6–September 5, 2022) is co-organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Gabriel Almeida Baroja, Curatorial Project Assistant, and Margaret Kross, former Senior Curatorial Assistant.

Whitney Biennial 2022 Member Preview Days

Thursday, March 31
10:30 am–6 pm

Friday, April 1
10:30 am–10 pm

Saturday, April 2
10:30 am–6 pm

Sunday, April 3

10:30 am–6 pm 

Monday, April 4
10:30 am–6 pm