Spanning more than six decades, the seventy works on paper in this exhibition are organized alphabetically by title to create a Johnsian system of its own. Employing the alphabet as a readymade structure, the exhibition merges form and content into more than an arrangement of Johns’s works, but rather, a model of his artistic strategies on display. The exhibition therefore asks: what happens when we put Johns’s work to his own manner of logic and experimentation?

Jasper Johns: a whole can be only a part is organized by Jessica Eisenthal, inaugural Jasper Johns Curatorial Fellow at the Powers Art Center. The Fellowship supports original research and curatorial work centered on the Ryobi Foundation’s collection of Jasper Johns’s works on paper.