Narrator: Whitten made this sculpture in 1965, just a few months after the Civil Rights leader Malcolm X was assassinated.
Artist, Jack Whitten: The hatred and growing up in Alabama. The experiences I had with the civil right marches that we did. People attacking you with sticks and throwing rocks at you. I had to deal with all of that in the 1960s.
Narrator: Whitten reflected on this sculpture more than 50 years after he made it, in an interview from 2017.
Jack Whitten: It’s stained for Blackness. You see the back with all of the stuck-in pieces there? That’s rough stuff. Very rough stuff. The horn section smooths out, becomes very smooth. That middle section is built that way that it provides a middle ground. It has different stages of touch in it. So it’s an instrument of time, built in three sections—sort of connects the past with the present. That’s what that piece is.
Malcolm was not as one-dimensional as people try to make him be. Man had many stages to his personality. It’s another example of white folks trying to squeeze Black people into one-dimensional people. But we’re not that.
Audio files of interpretation from the BMA exhibition, Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture