Artist, Jack Whitten: I knew that if stayed in the South, somebody was gonna kill me or I was gonna kill somebody, so I left. I took a Greyhound bus to New York.
The 1960s was what I call my autobiographical period. It was Jack Whitten putting Jack Whitten on the couch. You have to pick yourself apart—sexually, politically, aesthetically. That's the basic thing in being human: know thyself.
What’s driving it though is what was happening in society at that time. We got the height of the Vietnam War, we have the height of the Civil Rights Movement. We’ve had three, four political assassinations. To be a young man here in New York, and to be a young Black man on top of it—you had a lot of shit to deal with. There was a lot on your plate.
This had an effect on us as painters. I’m doing political-inspired paintings. I’m doing savagery, New York battleground, right? In the air are like helicopters you’ll see in Vietnam. Horrible, horrible nightmares.
Narrator: Whitten was under pressure to comment on social and political struggles by creating art that depicted the real world. Instead, he began exploring those themes using abstraction.
Jack Whitten: I was an abstract figurative expressionist. Figurative-based, but loose. They were bright, intensity, expressive quality, color, extremely emotional. That’s the best way to describe it.
Archival audio courtesy of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive and The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution