Jack Whitten’s New York Through Six Artworks

Portrait of Jack Whitten on Broome Street, New York, 1974

New York City was Jack Whitten’s beloved home from 1960 until his death in 2018. The City was a crucial source of inspiration, found material, and community, and where, in his studio “laboratory,” his extraordinary work took shape. It was also often a struggle. “As a young man here in New York, and to be a young Black man on top of it,” Whitten said of the 1960s, “you had a lot of shit to deal with. There was a lot on your plate.” And the following decade, he wrote in his journal, “It’s very hard to live here but what can one do? All the energy is here, the challenge of making it…the testing ground of the art world.”¹ Despite a vast network of artist friends since his student days at Cooper Union, and an astonishing output, at the age of 72, in 2012, he talked about how his abstract paintings were “only now” getting some attention.²

There are dozens of works that help tell the story of all of the artists his path crossed in New York; the inspiration and material he drew from the sidewalk and what he saw out the window of his downtown studio; the cultural scene—especially jazz—that inspired his own inventions and improvisations. Below are six paintings currently on view at MoMA that open a small window onto Whitten’s New York.

Jack Whitten. NY Battle Ground. 1967. Oil on canvas

NY Battle Ground (1967)

“How can anyone justify staying in the studio when your people are dying? What is the artist supposed to do?” Jack Whitten wrote. Confronted with the violence of the 1960s—from the suppression of the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War—Whitten created NY Battle Ground in a world that seemed to be in flames. Though the forms are ambiguous, they manifest struggle, combat, even apocalypse. Disturbed by endlessly circulated images of wartime helicopters abroad and of police violence in the American South, Whitten reinvented the gestural brushstrokes of his Abstract Expressionist mentors to evoke the catastrophes of the world. He framed the composition with a black curved line, suggesting a television set and the filter of technological media.

Light Sheet I (1969)

Every night for a week in 1965, Whitten went with his brother and jazz musician, Tommy Whitten, to see John Coltrane perform at Club Coronet in Brooklyn. Describing his music to Jack after a performance one night, Coltrane exclaimed, “Don’t you understand? It’s like a wave!” Whitten translated the idea of a wave of sound into sheets of light. Using a pulley system of his own construction, the artist raised and lowered large frames stretched with a fine mesh netting over canvas, and then pressed layers of acrylic paint through the mesh in a process similar to photographic silkscreening. The resulting cascade of color suggests an effect that Whitten called “planar light,” by which the multidimensionality of jazz is channeled into planes of light and color that appear to burst forth from the two-dimensional canvas.

Jack Whitten. Light Sheet I (detail). 1969. Acrylic on canvas

Jack Whitten. Door To Manhattan. 1990. Acrylic on canvas

Skins

In 1980, Whitten’s Soho studio burned down in a devastating fire. The artist took years to rebuild, and did not make any work until 1983. When he emerged, he began experimenting with a wholly new way of using acrylic paint: creating plaster molds of objects and surfaces found in New York streets, from the ridged bottoms of bottles to manhole covers and metal grates, and then filling them with acrylic paint to cast sculptural reliefs. Whitten called these works “skins,” and they served as an index of the hardness and hardships of the city around him. But they also allowed him to find a way to rebuild, to bring the world back into his work.

Jack Whitten. Norman Lewis Triptych I. 1985. Acrylic and oil on canvas

Norman Lewis Triptych I (1985)

The scale of this three-panel work suggests the depth of Whitten’s admiration for his mentor and friend, the Abstract Expressionist painter Norman Lewis, who died in 1979. When Whitten met Lewis in 1962, he was one of few role models for a young Black artist—and abstract painter—in New York. Their shared interest in science, technology, and jazz had a lasting influence on Whitten’s developing techniques. Later, Whitten wrote, “There is a personal Norman Lewis legacy that I and only I must fulfill.” For this tribute, Whitten pressed a gridded screen into wet acrylic, creating raised square units in relief, then added dabs of colorful oil paint to illuminate the grid. The resulting composition suggests a pixelated screen or an aerial view of city lights.

For J.M.B (1988)

Whitten met the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in the early 1980s. From his studio window in downtown New York, Whitten could see one of Basquiat’s infamous “SAMO” graffiti tags. Following the young artist’s untimely death in 1988, Whitten created For J.M.B. This small-scale work, its gold frame reminiscent of devotional icons, diverges from the abstract language Whitten developed in the 1980s, reintroducing the representational through collaged images. He described Basquiat’s short yet productive career as the embodiment of an “unchecked freedom,” characterized by “spontaneous . . . visual poems” that existed “outside of art history.”

Jack Whitten. For J.M.B. 1988. Acrylic and collage on board in gold-leaf artist’s frame

Jack Whitten. 9.11.01. 2006. Acrylic, ash, blood, hair, and mixed media on canvas

9.11.01 (2006)

Whitten spent 40 years living and working in downtown Manhattan, having moved there in 1962. He watched the construction of the World Trade Center towers—and he was standing outside his studio when they came down, during the attacks of September 11, 2001. After that date, Whitten stopped making art for several years—except for this large-scale painting, composed of thousands of tiles of acrylic paint, to which he devoted five years of study and experimentation. Incorporating materials such as ash and dust, the work stands as one of the most powerful monuments of our time. “What I saw will haunt me forever,” he said. “The painting is a promise to all those people.”

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