Jasper Johns is an artist of structures.

Spanning more than six decades, the works on paper in this exhibition are organized alphabetically by title to create a Johnsian system of its own. The term Johnsian being a descriptor pertaining to the complexities of Johns' infamous artistic style and approach to artmaking.

a whole can be only a part merges form and content into more than an arrangement of Johns’s works, but rather, a model of his artistic strategies on display. As with the artist’s common motifs—flags, targets, numbers, maps—Johns was drawn to the alphabet as a found system. Corresponding to Johns’s interests in signs and seriality, language and chance, the alphabetical sequence reflects the artist’s enduring exploration of how meaning is conveyed. The exhibition, therefore, asks: what happens when we put Johns’s work to his own manner of logic and experimentation?

The show’s title—a whole can be only a part— borrowed from a poem that American composer John Cage wrote about the artist, refers to the relationship between a fragment and its whole, a central preoccupation in Johns’s work that equally encapsulates the proposition of this exhibition. With both Cage and Duchamp in mind as key interlocutors for Johns, the approach of this project seeks something similar. Within the alphabet—one conceptual system—all others can be contained.

Jasper Johns: a whole can be only a part is organized by Jessica Eisenthal in collaboration with the Powers Art Center.