Robert Whitman

Robert Whitman studied at Columbia University and Rutgers University. The recorded working language is English. Work by Robert Whitman is recorded in the collections of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship.

• Name — Robert Whitman • Born — 23 May 1935 • Birthplace — New York City, U.S. • Died — 19 January 2024 • Place of death — Warwick, New York, U.S. • Children — 3 • Training — * Rutgers University • Columbia University • Movement — Performance art • Works — Experiments in Art and Technology

Whitman was born in Manhattan, New York City, on May 23, 1935, and moved to Englewood, New Jersey, at the age of 10, after his father's death. He attended the local public schools and the Englewood School for Boys (now part of Dwight-Englewood School). Whitman studied literature at Rutgers University from 1953 to 1957 and art history at Columbia University in 1958. He was represented by the Pace Gallery in New York. Whitman died at his home in Warwick, New York, on January 19, 2024, at the age of 88. His grandfather was the Metropolitan Museum of Art president Robert W. DeForest.

Whitman was a member of the group of visual artists - Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg - who in the early 1960s presented theater pieces on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Whitman 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 to create works that incorporated new technology for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a series of performance artworks presented October 13–23 in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. 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 was held in 1976 sponsored by the Dia Art Foundation and presented six earlier works and the premiere of Light Touch. His theater works have been presented at the Galerie Maeght Festival in France, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Walker Art Center, Vera List Art Center at MIT, and many more. Ghost, his most recent theater performance, was staged at the Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York City in 2002. In 2003 the Dia Art Foundation, in 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, Spain in September 2005. A major book, Playback, a comprehensive study of his work, accompanied this exhibition. In the fall of 2004, Whitman presented a theater performance, Antenna, in Leeds, England, sponsored by Lumens, as part of the New Media Festival there.

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.

Robert Whitman is recorded with the occupation performance artist. Recorded with the occupation film director. Recorded as artist, illustrator and film director.