Artist, Jack Whitten: Each painting comes out of specific experience, with a specific narrative built into it.
Narrator: For 40 years, Whitten lived in Tribeca, just north of the World Trade Center. He witnessed the Twin Towers being built in the late 1960s. And he was there when the buildings were attacked on September 11, 2001.
Jack Whitten: I was in the street that morning. This plane came right overhead, and when that sound came overhead, you could feel your flesh crawling, I mean, seriously, rippling. We looked up, this plane was right on top of us. At first you didn’t see any flame, any smoke. You just saw this big gap and hole, and the sky was filled with a chandelier of glass. It was later you saw the smoke and the flames. My gut feeling told me that that was not an accident. This is what I call the particularities of violence—close to 3,000 people were murdered in my neighborhood. People were screaming, crying.
Narrator: After that experience, Whitten stopped making art for several years — except for this work, which took him five years to complete. It’s composed of thousands of tiles of acrylic paint infused with materials like ash, dust, and blood.
Jack Whitten: I wanted that painting to be more raw and visceral. A lot of emotional stuff in there. I’ve had people that stand before that painting and cry.
Archival audio courtesy of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive