Fourteen Billion Years: Jack Whitten’s Light

The question I always return to with Jack Whitten is, why did he insist on abstraction? Whitten grew up in the segregated South at the height of Jim Crow. He went from that experience to the Tuskegee Institute, then left behind his studies (and a certain prosperity guaranteed for a doctor and pilot) to become an artist. Pulled by a nagging creative imagination, Whitten chose to apply to Cooper Union. As a young man he shaped his insistent, intentional desire to make art into the form of abstraction. While the pursuit of abstraction can amount to an intense internal struggle, it also seems that it allowed Whitten a space of freedom.

It was impossible to put that experience into language: representation was only a way to further bind oneself, to keep one limited to a particular kind of ideation of who one could be. So much of what I take from Whitten’s work is this insistence on liberation born of abstraction—not having to be an identifiable person, not having to participate in any of the constructs of what a human or a spirit could be.

Whitten thought about light so much. He had an obsession with light, reflecting light, capturing light. Light is an omnipresent reality, a constant medium in which we are all suspended. It is the most fundamental, necessary, and universal aspect of our collective existence. Across his paintings, we’re suspended in this light, which frames us in a larger picture of time, one that puts the violence of racism and other social constructs in place. You can conceive of time on that level, as the poet Robin Coste Lewis does, imagining “fourteen billion years,” and even further back to “sixty billion—long before our planet was ever created” against “the idea of four paltry centuries.”¹ This understanding comes from knowing the interior of one’s own value and liberty. And Whitten keeps coming back to the sacredness of that form of deep time and ancient light, yet with an insistence on the secular. Abstraction allows for that balancing of contradictions and a commitment to the material. How does materiality give some kind of meaning? As an artist, I’ve been thinking about that question constantly, my whole life.

Jack Whitten. Atopolis: For Édouard Glissant. 2014. Acrylic on canvas, eight panels

This obsession with light set Whitten apart from a lot of his peers. He was committed to painting and committed to abstraction and to the desire for a different form of the political in painting. Critics have been skeptical of that wish: Can abstraction really do what it claims? But this skepticism is often a kind of illiteracy, a cultural illiteracy and a real loss of a particular idea of what non-objective painting and abstraction could be and do. Whitten writes clearly about this in his studio log: “The spirit does not have an image . . . one can only feel its presence.”² It’s not something that can be a symbol, something you can see, but it can be felt. Abstraction can be an experience that you can feel, that you are in the presence of. Whitten knew the somatic sense of how a painting can conjure experience, rather than being something that can be read or deciphered. Atopolis: For Édouard Glissant (2014; above), for example, is experienced as the feeling of being in the cosmos. This is not just the sense of placelessness that comes from being part of a diaspora, but placelessness as an immensity that we are all suspended in. That painting makes a physical, almost archaeological, experience—a vibration—and you can look at it forever.

Whitten was so insistent on the physicality of paint, working with the particularities of acrylic. And yet you could compare the somatic experience of his work to that of someone like the artist Robert Irwin. You might think of them as working in completely opposite directions, but each experimented with light, the optical, and the physical embodiment of art. Each took in questions of perception, of phenomena that go beyond the human grasp, although they used that information very differently.

Whitten confronted the tumultuous times he lived through in his art. In works like Dead Reckoning I (1980), he searched for new ways of articulating those experiences we lack language for. The central diagram in this work reminds me of John Coltrane’s “Circle of Tones,” a kind of mysterious musical map; but it also suggests a cosmic device, a celestial navigation system for when you are lost. When Whitten made this painting in the 1980s, culture felt adrift—not just in the art world, but in terms of a broader conservative swing toward Reaganism and its reversal of the gains of the Civil Rights era. Black artists had been getting attention (Whitten’s solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, for example) and then were completely brushed aside, almost erased as if they had never happened, as if Whitten and Frank Bowling weren’t sitting at the same table as curators and critics like Clement Greenberg. Those memories seemed totally erased in the ’80s. I’d imagine that such erasure would be disorienting to many artists—a feeling of being lost at sea while trying to negotiate relevance in a moment when no one is looking. When that spotlight moves away, you are alone. How do you invent a way of being?

Box of records from Whitten’s personal collection in his Queens studio, 2024

Jack Whitten. Light Sheet I. 1969. Acrylic on canvas

Increasingly, it feels as if we are living in a moment like that again, with a reversal of gains. But perhaps this is manifested differently in culture. Rather than erasure, there seems to be a lot of support for work that really feels like the watering-down of content and rigor. It feels as if there is an enormous amount of representational work being celebrated, though rarely with any links to the Black radical tradition. It’s a terrifying, ahistorical time, particularly in how people are thinking about creativity. There’s a growing concern about using words like “universalism.” But I think artists like Jack Whitten and John Coltrane, working during that earlier era, had faith in universalism as a saving belief and value in the face of all forms of inhumanity. They offered an insistence on knowledge of one’s own value, a knowledge leading to a much larger, even global picture, though not what we think of now as “globalization.” That universalism served instead as a new cosmopolitanism, a new form of collectivism. When Coltrane toured, for example, he constantly found new instruments unknown to him to play and to practice, such as the traditional shakuhachi bamboo flute he took up in Japan. When asked about the flute, Coltrane is said to have replied that he was “searching for the sound of Nagasaki.” That has always stayed with me—an ongoing search for the collective experience. Whitten experimented with something similar in abstraction, with his base and values in the Black radical tradition. This experience wasn’t built in a self-representational pictorial space, but through abstraction as horizon, through liberation as horizon, through the somatic metaphysics of invention as a portal to the collective. His idea of light shines out constantly . . . omnipresent and everywhere.

—As told to Michelle Kuo

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of Jack Whitten: The Messenger today.

Jack Whitten: The Messenger is on view at MoMA March 23–August 2, 2025.