Artist, Jack Whitten: The monoliths—it’s about a person in the Black community, someone who has made amazing contributions, someone who has made a difference, important people in society.
Narrator: Whitten came up with the concept for this series in Greece.
Jack Whitten: At my house in Crete, we got a fantastic monolith, a bulge of rock coming up out of the earth that stands over 300 feet or more. It’s so impressive. So my mind, symbolic, is thinking, Black Monolith, that kind of a presence. All of those Black Monoliths had this massive presence about them.
Narrator: This one is dedicated to the painter Jacob Lawrence, whose work chronicled the African American experience. Whitten first met Lawrence as a young art student, when one of his teachers, Robert Blackburn, introduced him to several Black artists from an earlier generation.
Jack Whitten: Robert Blackburn took me under his wing. Immediately introduced me to a bunch of people in the community. He was like, grabbing me, “You’ve got to go meet Romare Bearden.” He calls up Romare, “Hey man, we got a Black student here at the Cooper. You gotta meet him.” [Laughs] So he takes me to Romare Bearden. And then Romare says, “You gotta meet Jacob Lawrence,” so he sends me to Jacob Lawrence. Those were my first great mentors.
Narrator: Whitten worked on the series over the course of more than two decades.
Jack Whitten: The Black community, we got so many important people to celebrate, I could do Black Monoliths the rest of my life. It’s a memorial. It’s a dedication. It’s an act of thanking you for what you have done, what you’ve given me, what I’ve learned from you. It’s an act of reverence.
Archival audio courtesy of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive and The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution