Artist, Jack Whitten: In the early ‘60s, I was spending all my free time hanging out in the jazz clubs. I actually knew Miles Davis, knew Thelonious Monk. I had come from a musical background playing the horn. When I had made the commitment to go totally into painting, it was only natural that music would be the major influence.
Narrator: This work honors Ornette Coleman, a trumpeter and saxophonist who Whitten heard many times at a club called the Five Spot. Coleman was a founder of "free jazz," which broke away from traditional chord sequences and time structures. The loose, open arrangement of the tiles here suggests that sense of freedom.
Jack Whitten: Jazz is the expansion of freedom. That’s what it’s about. This is what attracts people to it, all over the world. This is what attracts artists to it. Spontaneity—extremely important ingredient.
Narrator: For Whitten, working with acrylic mosaic tiles encouraged that spontaneity.
Jack Whitten: I have hundreds of them that are just sitting for use. When I’m building those paintings, it’s all this material I got over the whole studio floor. Brief, conceptualized in how you lay it out, but beyond that, pure intuition, which gave me a fantastic freedom to work.
Archival audio courtesy of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive and The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution