Artist, Jack Whitten: I started playing sax in junior high. In high school, we formed a dance band. But the sounds I heard when I came to New York in the early ‘60s, I knew that there was no way I could participate. [Laughs] I love it, but my skills as a musician, there’s no way. [Laughs]
The music was a way of me defining myself. I couldn't do it with the horn, so I figured I could deal with it in paint.
Narrator: Whitten started college as a premed student at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In 1960, he moved to New York to study art at the Cooper Union. During this time, Whitten immersed himself in the city’s jazz scene, meeting musicians, like the saxophone player John Coltrane.
Jack Whitten: John was playing out in Brooklyn at a club called Coronet, we would go out there like every night. I was speaking with John. He used the word wave, waving his hands. He says, “Well, you know, it's like a wave.” And something went off in my head. It identified with what I was feeling in painting. It came directly out of his music—that way of playing that he had. In Coltrane's terminology, it was sheets of sound, and I was working with things in terms of sheets of light.
Narrator: To make his “sheets of light,” Whitten built an apparatus for pushing the paint onto the canvas through a fine-mesh screen.
Jack Whitten: I made these huge silk screens. It was so big, I operated it with a pulley from the ceiling, with a rope. I would use the rope on the pulley to raise the screen, put it back down, flat over the canvas, press the paint through it, so the paint is being applied through a silk screen process. Light sheets came directly out of that talk with John Coltrane.
Narrator: You’ll hear Coltrane’s music throughout the exhibition—along with some of Whitten’s other favorite musicians.
Archival audio courtesy of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive and The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution