Douglas Witmer — Call and Response

January 13 — March 5, 2023

The Midwest Museum of American Art, Elkhart IN

The exhibition “Douglas Witmer – Call and Response” is a multi-faceted project that highlights the artist’s recent work, while demonstrating the integral relationship between an artist and a museum and the dialogues artists form with art that comes before them. For this exhibition, the Museum invited Witmer to curate works from the collection to be installed in conversation with his work. Witmer created new large-scale paintings for this show, which are presented in context with works by Abner Hershberger, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Pat Steir, and Warren Rohrer. The Museum is also proud to present the public debut of Witmer’s major 2020 work “Forty, For You,” a 40-piece suite of paintings and original music compositions intended as a contemplative experience.

Witmer’s relationship to The Midwest Museum of American Art began in the early 1990s when, as a student at Goshen College, he met, studied-under and occasionally assisted MMAA director Brian Byrn, forming an ongoing friendship. Since then Witmer has become internationally-known within the field of reductive abstract painting, steadily pursuing what he calls “a personal inquiry” into the materiality of the painted object.