Tag: artwork

You can almost feel a swoosh of air as the paint cascades across the canvas in Jack Whitten’s Prime Mover (1974). In this abstract painting, Whitten’s eternal experimentation, something that was critical to his artistic practice, comes alive in a sweeping stroke. The smooth smear, a photographic blur made with paint, shows viewers the rapturous pace at which ideas, inspirations, and innovations traversed through his mind.

This work, from the motion-driven series, “Slab Paintings,” is featured in “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art. This retrospective examines 60 years of Whitten’s career through 175 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that consider themes of race, war, consciousness, technology, jazz, and love.

Whitten was born in 1939 in Bessemer, Alabama and grew up in what he called “American Apartheid.” With stellar grades, he attended Tuskegee University with the intention of joining the military and becoming a doctor. But his call to create persisted, and he left Tuskegee to study art at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There, in the Jim Crow–era South, Whitten’s political consciousness was awakened. The viciousness of racism drove him to New York City, and in the fall of 1960, he began studying painting at the esteemed college Cooper Union. His peers included Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence; he was friendly with jazz greats Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and he had close contact with lifelong influences Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky.

During this time, Whitten found jazz to be a trustworthy confidante while he developed his practice. For him, jazz’s experimental nature ran parallel to the intuition needed to create abstract art. By the late 1960s, he was deeply connected to the zeitgeist, creating artwork that reflected the American experience. His piece New York Battle Ground (1967) is filled with intense imagery, red explosions, and orange bursts floating over a blue sky; blood and death permeate the canvas. At that time, the Vietnam War had been ongoing for 13 years and was an inflection point for race issues in the U.S. Many Black Americans, who faced segregation and discrimination, found it difficult to support the war. As they struggled for basic rights like sitting at a lunch counter, they were being asked to risk their lives for the very country that oppressed them.

As the Civil Rights Movement created a tectonic shift in America, Whitten dove deeper into abstract expressionism with vibrant, intense, and emotional works. At this time, Whitten created a series, inspired by a 1957 encounter with Dr. King. One such work, King’s Garden #4 (1968), features a rich blend of plum purples, pomegranate reds, mustard yellows, and olive greens—a lush array of colors and brushstrokes in conversation with one another. The painting captures a world that Dr. King dreamt of, a place where color knows no bounds.

During the 1960s and ’70s, there was a rise in Black abstraction. Many artists found in abstract works a new pathway that wasn’t muddied with the histories of racism, sexism, and elitism. Nonetheless, Black artists like Sam Gilliam, Ed Clark, Alma Thomas, and Howardena Pindell often felt the double-edged sword of abstraction. They weren’t allowed in art’s elite spaces because of their race (and in some cases, their gender). At the same time, Black abstractionists were accused of not contributing to the political agendas of Black power, progress, and revolution. While Black figuration directly pushed against negative narratives about Black people, abstract works like Whitten’s were not interpreted as clear statements of protest in the same way. For Whitten, however, abstraction offered a radical space of imagination free from the oppression of racism. For Black abstract artists, to reimagine your space and yourself as limitless amid systemic racism was (and still is) wildly powerful.

Throughout the exhibition, it’s evident that curiosity, experimentation, and innovation were the core tenets of Whitten’s practice, which only increased over time. In Golden Spaces (1971), Whitten layered paint and used the serrated edge of a saw to create rippling grooves that reveal a spectrum of colors beneath. This technique caused the paint to lift off the canvas, breaking the deeply ingrained notion of paint as a flat, two-dimensional medium.

Another of his techniques was using his afro pick to comb through the layered paint. Whitten further revolutionized his process by inventing a tool called the “Developer,” a 40-pound wooden squeegee with a 12-foot-long base. He poured layers of paint and swept the Developer across the canvas, blending the colors in a way that created an almost photographic sense of motion. This labor-intensive technique produced effects the art world had never seen before. In Pink Psyche Queen (1973), layers of green and gray peek through a bubblegum-pink surface, with a triangle shape subtly positioned in the center. Whitten often used a carpenter’s blade to carve through thick layers of acrylic paint, introducing new methods of mark-making into the medium.

As “The Messenger” shows, Whitten transitioned to new experiments with paint, moving away from a wet palette to working only on a dry one. In this process, he employed “tesserae,” the foundational technique of mosaic. He layered paint sometimes seven inches thick, let it dry, then cut it into small pieces. He laminated the cubes of paint, which were transfigured into luminous tiles. Whitten then applied the tiles to a dry canvas with an adhesive. Whitten tried and tested several processes, such as freeze drying the paint cubes, sometimes pulverizing them to ash and dust, all of which was incorporated back into the paintings.

Whitten began his “Black Monolith” series in the late 1980s, and it became one of the most intensive and extensive bodies of work in his career. The series is a continuum of love letters to Black heroes and icons. Many of the pieces were made in honor of specific individuals, such as Maya Angelou, Muhammad Ali, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. Du Bois—people who, like Whitten, were prolific and left lasting impacts on Black culture and society as a whole. The series reached a new peak with Black Monolith III For Barbara Jordan (1998). Jordan, a lawyer and professor, was the first Black woman from the South elected to Congress. In this piece, Whitten developed another innovation, elevating the tesserae off the canvas, creating a gleaming mountain of peaks and valleys that reflect Barbara Jordan’s iconic life.

Jazz continued to inspire Whitten. In his practice, he made homages to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and even named The Messenger (For Art Blakey) (1990), after the beloved jazz drummer that inspired him. Whitten thickened the paint, cut it into tiny black tiles, and applied it onto the canvas. He then splashed white paint over the tiles. The result is a series of supernovas bursting into stardust. Moved by the freedom of jazz, Whitten’s work suggests a wild cosmos, where anything is possible.

Atopolis: For Édouard Glissant (2014), is the crescendo of the exhibition. It is Whitten’s largest work, spanning eight panels, a masterful behemoth that uses the tesserae technique to build an intricate, glistening map. Whitten references Martiniquais philosopher Édouard Glissant’s theory of “Atopolis,” a powerful concept for people of the African diaspora, whose identity is often tied to having no sense of place. This work, made from thousands of acrylic tiles and casts, embedded with a range of media from aluminum to anthracite, creates a constellation of forms that imagines a new sense of place for Black identity. Whitten’s Atopolis represents a utopia comprised of myriad elements, a city born from the displaced, unanchored, and nomadic experiences of the descendants of the transatlantic slave trade. A place where all relationships are “thoroughly interconnected and egalitarian,” Whitten said. The work is an act of love, offering viewers who haven’t yet found their place in the world a blueprint to create a sense of belonging and home for themselves.

Whitten’s work, always labor-intensive and driven by innovation, has rightfully earned him a place in the pantheon of greatest abstractionists, as shown by “Jack Whitten: The Messenger.” The artist’s unrelenting passion and boundless curiosity fueled his courageous experimentation, enabling him to do what all great artists do—evolve.

West taps into legend and history to blur distinctions between the past and contemporary experience.

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