In this video, Whiting Tennis discusses his first experiences identifying as an artist and the intuitive decisions that often inform his artwork.

Drawing grounds Tennis’s practice, providing a starting point for the idiosyncratic forms that populate his sculptures, collages, and paintings. His three-dimensional works incorporate materials such as discarded wood and cardboard, concrete, plaster, paint, asphalt, and tar—each embraced for its particularities and histories. Surface and texture similarly play significant roles in Tennis’s two-dimensional works, which often combine paint with woodblock prints cut to evoke the patterns of plywood, brick, tree bark, and foliage.

Tennis’s first solo museum exhibition, Opener 22: Whiting Tennis, is part of the Tang Museum’s Opener series, which presents important bodies of work by contemporary artists through exhibitions and accompanying catalogues.

CREDITS | Producer/Camera/Editor: Vickie Riley. Interview: Ian Berry. 2nd Camera/Sound: Brett Hartman. Music: Dandelion by Whiting Tennis

©The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2011