“I follow the paintings wherever they take me,” Stanley Whitney has said. “If the painting goes out the door, I follow it out the door; if it goes out the window, I follow it out the window.” Born in 1946 in Philadelphia, Whitney came of age among artists who were responding to the Civil Rights movement. He, however, rejected the pressure to base his art in his identity as a Black man. He turned instead toward abstract painting and printmaking. Best known for his grids of colored squares, Whitney’s canvases parallel the polyphonies of jazz music. This exhibition in Athens looks to the innocence and calm of Arcadia, a garden realm in which all colors harmonize. “People say the color does this, or the color does that,” says Whitney. “I say the color does what it does.” —Maggie Turner