Jasper Johns is an artist of structures.  

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 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.  

As with the artist’s common motifs—flags, targets, numbers, maps—Johns was drawn to the alphabet as a found system. The alphabet has been the subject of three prints, which are included in these galleries, as well as six paintings and three drawings. 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?  

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.