Sub-Rural #46, Guy Whitney, 1949 – 2025

Guy Whitney, artist, School of the Art Institute graduate, founding member of N.A.M.E. gallery, skillful abstractionist, curator, and art handler passed away last week. Whitney was a graduate student at an opportune time in the  SAIC’s  history when the painting department influence coalesced around Ray Yoshida and Emilio Cruz. Yoshida drew one’s attention to wild child vernacular in selective proximities while Cruz inhabited a world of figurative gesturalism, poetry, and jazz.

Guy was most influenced by Cruz’s fluid compositions which conceived art with broad, intergenerational strokes. Cruz was also a source for Whitney’s approach to a manner of abstraction that was multicultural, and experimental.

The first memory I have of Guy was at a N.A.M. E. Gallery meeting in 1978 at his loft on 212 Canal Street. It was easily the most impressive and spacious loft I’d ever seen with a mind-blowing view east on the high-rise cradled Chicago River. The street in front contained a portal gate for the city’s 50-year-old Deep Tunnel Project. Just east was an elevated train and to the west a Metra switching station. I never understood how Guy was able to make art or find refuge in such a Weillian technological zone. Compose text perhaps, but the architecture was a massive, weather-beaten, turn of the century entity that made little room on the docket for picture-making and innovation.

Guy Whitney, 1979 Untitled from N.A.M.E. Portfolio

Nonetheless Whitney was producing abstract, pattern-based works on canvas and showing primarily at 9 W. Hubbard Street where N.A.M.E. anchored Chicago’s alternative gallery scene. Along with SAIC alum Barry Holden, Jerry Saltz, Othello Anderson, Michiko Itatani, and Phil Berkman, he co-piloted a seminal exhibition project that served a growing number of artists, designers and performers’ in the neighborhood with other cooperatives and the accompanying salons, diners, dance clubs and architecture studios.

Whitney was an art handler by day, partnering first with Tim Lynn and then Bruce MacGilpin when the business name became Icon Services. Guy’s other passion was sailing, and he crewed with former gallerist Donald Young on annual Mackinac yacht competitions. His life on the lake was nearly as gratifying to him as his art practice.

More recently Guy constructed enigmatic watercolors that explored the mythologies and interconnectedness of cultures far from a mercurial post-modern artworld. These were derived from years of pictorial interpretation of Native American tradition and Buddhist philosophy. He wasn’t interested in the faux-heroism or glamour of 80’s and 90’s art nor its slouching globalist turn and he subscribed to neither of the popular banalities of coastal or provincial art.

His work was not legible as deconstructive, relational, or transnational, despite being born and partly raised in Paris. He wasn’t ideologically focused or careerist. He embodied the somewhat discredited notion that artists’ only audience was other artists and his profound love of Chicago culture was soberly intimate and understated. His vision and philosophy of collaboration, indeed his contribution to the city, stemmed from Hubbard Street and that mindfulness was as constant and committed of any of his generation.

There will be a memorial for Guy Whitney on Friday, February 7^th from 5 – 7pm at the Chicago Corinthian Yacht Club, 601 W Montrose Ave, Chicago, IL