Artist, Jack Whitten: When I'm building the tesserae, it's always unique to subject. The subject is built into the paint.
Narrator: Whitten created a new set of mosaic tiles, or “tesserae,” for each painting, mixing colored pigments, metals, and other materials into an acrylic medium. Once dried and cut, he dropped these tiles into a bucket, and one-by-one, attached them to the canvas.
Jack Whitten: I was building the Barbara Jordan painting—that's when I pointed to the bucket, you know, “You see that bucket of paint over there? Barbara Jordan is in that bucket.” [laughs]
Narrator: Whitten dedicated this painting to Barbara Jordan, a lawyer and professor from Texas. In 1972, she became the first Black woman from the South to be elected to the United States Congress. Jordan was a powerful speaker and voice of conscience for the nation, a presence Whitten evokes here in the richly colored tiles.
He felt that subject matter, ideas, and emotions could be infused into the material.
Jack Whitten: Anything you want can be compressed into the paint. I can tell a story with it. I can build a narrative into it. It's not an illustration of something. It's within the thing itself.
Archival audio courtesy of The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution