About the Artist
Born in New York City in 1935, Robert Whitman studied literature at Rutgers University and art history at Columbia University. In the late fifties, he began to develop such pioneering theater works as The American Moon (1960), Mouth (1961) and Flower (1963), and to exhibit his sculpture and installations in some of New York’s most innovative galleries. In 1966, together with research engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg, Whitman co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a foundation that promotes collaborations among artists, engineers and scientists.
Whitman has staged more than 40 theater and performance pieces, many of which have also toured to European venues, including the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1987–1989); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2001–2002); and the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (2010). He has had solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum, New York (1968); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1968); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1973); and Dia Art Foundation (1976), New York. A large-scale retrospective of Whitman’s work was organized by Dia Art Foundation (2003) and traveled to Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal (2004), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (2005).