Jack Whitten created visionary beauty from righteous anger. Born in Bessemer, Alabama, amid the violence of the segregated South, he joined the Civil Rights movement, then made his way to New York in 1960. There, he decided to become an artist. Through his exploration of materials and tools—from new paints to Afro-combs and electrostatic printing—Whitten invented art-making techniques that were the first of their kind. Through his confrontation with racial prejudice and technological change, he made art matter in a world in turmoil. This retrospective is the first to span all six decades and every medium of Whitten’s innovative practice, and features more than 175 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that illuminate his singular artistic journey.
In the 1970s, Whitten experimented with pulling layers of acrylic paint across a floor-bound canvas in a sweeping movement, producing a luminous, quasi-photographic blur. In the 1990s, he cut hardened sheets of acrylic paint into thousands of mosaic tiles to assemble richly textured paintings that suggest pixels or galaxies. For decades, Whitten spent his summers in Greece, constructing sculptures that fused the arts of Africa and the ancient Mediterranean with contemporary technologies. He often dedicated his works to figures in Black history, as if he were a messenger—and his art a way of sending meaning out into the world. “I am a conduit for the spirit,” he declared. “It flows through me and manifests in the materiality of paint.”
Jack Whitten: The Messenger presents a revelatory history of the artist’s exploration of race, technology, jazz, love, and war. From the upheaval of the 1960s to the end of his life in 2018, Whitten faced great pressure to pursue representational art as a form of activism. Yet he dared to invent forms of abstraction—and offered the world a new way to see.
Organized by Michelle Kuo, Chief Curator at Large and Publisher, with Helena Klevorn, Curatorial Assistant to the Chief Curator at Large and Publisher, Dana Liljegren, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and David Sledge, Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Painting and Sculpture. Thanks to JaBrea Patterson-West, Kiko Aebi, and Eana Kim.
