Jack Whitten: Ten Things to Know About the Visionary Artist

2. Whitten also invented what he called acrylic tesserae—a kind of mosaic composed of paint.

Around 1990, Whitten suddenly invented another art form. Starting with sheets of dried acrylic paint, spread flat in trays or on tables to dry, he used a razor blade to carve, slice, or shatter the hardened acrylic into small tiles. Each tile could be combined with hundreds or thousands of others to form sprawling, intricately constructed abstract paintings. “My acrylic paint tesserae represent the evolution of Cézanne’s brushstroke, Seurat’s dot, Picasso’s cube, Malevich and Mondrian’s square, de Kooning’s gestures, Pollock’s line,” he said. These puzzles of visual information suggest both ancient Byzantine mosaics and digital images. As Whitten noted, “When I break it down into these little bits that I work with, it’s like a pixel. Like each tesserae is a piece of light…. The message is coded into the process.” The tiles also evoke the multipart construction of African sculpture, which Whitten likened to the infinitely combinable bits of digital technology, or a kind of universal code.

4. We are still figuring out how Whitten made his astonishing paintings.

This exhibition at MoMA is the first time that Whitten’s work has undergone a major conservation study: the first technical analyses of his innovative and shape-shifting materials and techniques. Watch our How to See Jack Whitten video to learn more about his process from his family, curators, and conservators.

6. Whitten was inspired by jazz.

“The person who got me trapped in all of this was John Coltrane,” Whitten once wrote. By “this” he meant his lifelong exploration of the formal possibilities of painting. A jazz critic had referred to Coltrane’s cascading notes as “sheets of sound,” and Whitten dubbed his experiments in layering paint “planes of light.” Like the jazz musicians he admired, Whitten created a process that moved freely between composition and improvisation. Listen to this playlist to learn more about Whitten’s lifelong love affair with jazz.

8. Whitten used abstraction as a force for change.

“I come from a people whose culture was totally cut off,” Whitten wrote in his journal. “The prize is to reconstruct the culture.” He began his Black Monoliths in 1988, celebrating influential Black figures throughout history. The series title refers to a monumental rock formation near his house in Greece, which prompted him to create the first of the paintings in honor of James Baldwin, the writer and civil rights activist who had died in 1987. Whitten later dedicated works to W. E. B. Du Bois, Maya Angelou, Ornette Coleman, Muhammad Ali, and others.

Rather than depicting a face or likeness, Whitten’s Black Monoliths are abstract—the paint infused with materials such as coal dust, pearlescent powder, and octopus ink to evoke or even embody the works' subjects. The kaleidoscopic mosaics and reliefs suggest individual elements or fragments coming together: constellations of stars, glittering gems, waves of sound, or masses of earth.

10. The streets of New York were Whitten’s greatest inspiration.

“On the sidewalk I can see more purity of form than in any New York art gallery,” he wrote in Notes from the Woodshed². And in another artist statement, Whitten explained, “The immediate urban environment of New York City provides the raw material of my paintings. Everyday I am confronted with the raw primitive struggle of survival and the sophisticated advanced technologies of media. I recognize my image in the clash of extremes…My environment is unnatural, unsensual, tough and uncompromising. Within this milieu I have decided to create my art. The painting is not the conduit. I am the conduit.”³ Learn more about the artist’s six decades in New York.