Narrator: In the 1980s, Whitten began using plaster of Paris to make molds from everyday objects.
Artist, Jack Whitten: I'm doing things like making molds of manhole covers, molds taken from the sidewalk, from a tree in Central Park, molds made from my running shoes, from bubble wrap, supermarket packages. I'd run down to Canal Street to the fish market, take plaster of Paris, pour right directly on the fish, get a mold of it, take the fish, and have it for lunch.
Narrator: Whitten filled the molds with acrylic paint to make reliefs that he would attach to the surface of his canvases.
Jack Whitten: The idea of the paint as collage was really taking hold. Heavy acrylic surfaces. The paintings are being constructed—laminating, carving, sanding, gluing—that's what's happening in the paint.
For the first time in abstraction, I'm using referential material. I can go out in the street, get the sidewalk, bring it into the canvas. If I take a mold and I present it to you in a painting, your first feeling would be, “Oh, it's a found object.” But it's not a found object. So your mind is like, “What's illusion, what's not illusion here?” It's a great tension between them, very great tension.
Archival audio courtesy of The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution