Jack Whitten

The artist Jack Whitten offered the world a new way to see. He worked throughout his prolific career to reimagine art and its relation to society. “My paintings are designed as weapons,” he wrote. “Their objective is to penetrate and destroy the Western aesthetic. Their final objective is political in nature.”¹ The politics he had in mind was not producing slogans or literal messages, but changing one’s vision and experience of the world.

Whitten was born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939, the son of a coal miner and a seamstress, and grew up under segregation in the Jim Crow era. In school he developed an interest in art and jazz. He enrolled in pre-medical studies at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1957, serving as an Air Force ROTC cadet, before transferring to Southern University in Louisiana to study art. Throughout this time, Whitten was engaged in the Civil Rights movement; his first paid artistic commission was a poster for a Civil Rights demonstration. He met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. following the Montgomery bus boycott and co-organized a sit-down protest with other students in Baton Rouge. Sustained, violent backlash to the movement eventually prompted Whitten to leave the South to attend art school at the Cooper Union in New York City.

Whitten’s early works engage with this legacy of violence and the limits of direct representation. In Birmingham 1964, the artist assembled a painted foil support punctured with a gash that opens to reveal a sheer stocking. This mesh layer, in turn, obscures a newsprint photograph of a police dog attacking a teenager at a demonstration in Alabama. The work features, yet also veils, a sensational image of protest and repression, from an event widely covered in the popular press. Documentation becomes a gaping wound, conveying the impossibility of historical redress or closure.

During his early years in New York, Whitten developed relationships with mentors in the city’s tight-knit art scene, particularly those associated with the Spiral group and Abstract Expressionism, including Romare Bearden, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Norman Lewis. Equally formative were his forays into the world of jazz. Whitten felt the influence of John Coltrane most strongly, transferring the musician’s iconic and rapid-fire “sheets of sound” into visual terms Whitten called “sheets of light,” imagining his paintings as “energy fields” capable of projecting vision across vast expanses of space and time. In the early 1970s he transformed his workspace into a “laboratory,” building a 14-by-20-foot “drawing board” to experiment in paint on his studio’s floor. On this perfectly flat surface, Whitten laid down dense slabs of acrylic on canvas, which he manipulated with tools such as Afro-combs, saws, and squeegees, eventually using a large wooden rake, which he named the “Developer,” in reference to photography, to pull paint across the canvas in a single motion.

Whitten’s innovative work brought early recognition, including a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, where he displayed an abstract series of acrylic paintings made with single sweeps of the Developer. In making works such as Siberian Salt Grinder (1974), Whitten relied on controlled chance operations to produce a nearly photographic blur of dragged paint. In a subsequent series made between 1975 and 1978, Whitten largely restricted his palette to black and white. These works, dubbed the “Greek Alphabet” paintings, became his first major museum acquisitions, entering the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Whitten drew a direct line between these optical experiments in black and white and the politics of vision.

Throughout his career, Whitten also made relentlessly inventive sculpture and works on paper. A residency at the Xerox Corporation allowed him to access novel printing technologies, which he in turn incorporated into his own hand-drawn work, such as applying electrostatic pigment (toner) directly to paper and setting it with heat. Each summer, beginning in 1969, Whitten spent time on the island of Crete in Greece, honing an extensive sculptural practice. The resulting works were based on wood carving and assemblage, building on layered histories of African, Greek, and Byzantine art to study what he called the “DNA of visuality,” or the global origins of art and aesthetics.

Whitten painted like a sculptor, and sculpted like a painter. Across both mediums, he increasingly focused on the creative reuse of material. In 1973 he began cutting, planing, and sanding paint from pre-existing canvases and reassembling those fragments into what he called “paint as collage.” In the 1980s he used paint to cast molds of the urban environment around him, building up canvases as memorials to site and place. Then, in a major breakthrough beginning in 1990, Whitten developed a new approach to working with acrylic, in which he sliced large, dried slabs or films of paint into tiles, or tesserae, which could then be applied and endlessly rearranged on a canvas. As the artist emphasized, he no longer painted paintings but made them: “The painting must be built,” he wrote, ”like you are building a stone wall.”² These works frequently took the shape of memorials for artists, writers, and philosophers, particularly Black cultural figures. Whitten’s abstraction formed an outward-looking practice, one embodying an ethics of generosity within a broader community.

For Whitten, that ongoing dedication of the artist to others, rooted in a wider world, “insists on the expansion of freedom. Experimentation is the key. I believe that there are sounds we have not heard. I believe that there are colors we have not seen. And I believe that there are feelings yet to be felt.”³

Note: Opening quote is from Jack Whitten, Wed, December 27, 2017, as quoted in Katy Siegel, ed., Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed (Zurich: Hauser & Wirth, 2018), 517.

David Sledge, Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2025