Jack Whitten Went Hard in the Paint

May 29, 2025 / Billboard Lifestyle /

He poured the paint in layers and combed through it with an Afro pick. Or he froze and shattered it, reassembling the shards into new wholes. Like an alchemist, he altered its consistency with precisely calibrated tinctures. Like a hoodoo man, he infused it with ash, blood, and fragments of bone. His studio on Lispenard Street, in Tribeca, was full of contraptions, and his notebooks boiled over with a mad scientist’s exuberance. “TRUTH IS A PROCESS OF ELIMINATION” he exults in one entry; in another, a transformative residency at Xerox sparks an outburst of gospel: “I am on my way to glory / a child of the plane.” In the nineteen-nineties, he attained that glory with the invention of his “tesserae” paintings, arranging bits of hardened acrylic into glittering free-form mosaics. One called “Black Monolith II (For Ralph Ellison)” confronts you as you enter “The Messenger,” his new MOMA retrospective—a dark apparition checkered with iridescent squares, suggestive of a man’s silhouette, with a small razor where you’d expect a mouth.

Jack Whitten made it his life’s mission to give abstraction soul. “I believe that there are sounds we have not heard,” he once said. “I believe that there are colors we have not seen. And I believe that there are feelings yet to be felt.” He proved it again and again, from the sixties, when he distilled the anger and yearning of the civil-rights struggle into the language of abstract expressionism, to his death, in 2018, just three years after Barack Obama presented him the National Medal of Arts. The MOMA exhibition throws new light on his celebrated tesserae works—such as his twenty-foot-wide tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, which he witnessed—by presenting them as the capstone to a lifetime of experimentation. It’s a breathtaking, deeply researched glimpse of a career that unfolded in one long eureka.

Whitten reconciled creative impulses that often seemed diametrically opposed. Michelle Kuo, who organized the show, argues in the catalogue that Whitten created a third abstraction between “gestural painting and the grid,” synthesizing Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian. He approached painting like science, but also flirted with spiritualism, drawing inspiration from African sculpture’s ritual efficacy. Perhaps the greatest contradiction he overcame was being a Black artist who didn’t practice figuration—a position anathema, in his early years, to both sides of the art world’s color line. In all of this, his lodestar was jazz, which he unsuccessfully pursued as a tenor saxophonist before adopting it as a philosophy. Devoted to the music’s experimentalism, its blend of composition and improvisation, and its universalism rooted in African American particularity, he’s the rare Black artist for whom the analogy is more than a reductive cliché.

“Black Monolith VII, Du Bois Legacy: For W.E. Burghardt” (2014).Photograph by Jonathan Muzikar / The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Near the exhibition’s entrance is “Homecoming: For Miles” (1992), a painting whose hundreds of square-shaped acrylic tesserae evoke a pixelated grayscale image of the cosmic microwave background. Nebular patches alternate with blotches of jet; just visible in the foreground is a circle of white dots crossed with lines that meet at its center, like a spoked wheel of stars. The painting is an elegy for Miles Davis, and though no album is specified, I was immediately reminded of “In a Silent Way,” the hypnotic record—all brushed drums and stellar synths—that marked the beginning of Davis’s fusion era. Jazz purists complained that its edited loops and electrified instruments were a violation of the genre’s integrity. Yet what he’d really done was create a symbiosis between spontaneity and system, using recorded improvisation as material.

“Homecoming” was constructed similarly. Whitten poured out a layer of black paint; spattered it, haphazardly, with white dots; let it dry; and then used a razor to cut the resulting sheet into tiles. Only then did he fashion a universe from these units of randomness. “Space is not a place,” he’d once written, cryptically, in a studio log. Was it an allusion to Sun Ra, who’d said that it was? A comment on the paint’s illusionism, the conjuring of infinite depths on a wafer-thin slice of acrylic? Perhaps he meant that space was a state of mind, an act of will, a command one could give oneself—as he wrote, alluding to “Star Trek,” at the end of one of his long lists of aspirational commandments: “Number one, ‘Make it so!’ ”

Installation view of Jack Whitten The Messenger.

Whitten was an artist who looked relentlessly forward, and his origins explain why. He was born in Bessemer, Alabama, a coal town, in 1939, at the height of Jim Crow. His father worked in the mines. His mother was a seamstress, whose deceased first husband had been a sign painter; Whitten inherited his tools. He studied at Tuskegee Institute, intending to become a doctor, before transferring to Southern University, where he not only discovered his artistic vocation but also organized civil-rights marches. The struggle is inescapable in his early work. “Birmingham 1964,” an assemblage, takes the form of a jagged circular gape in blackened aluminum foil. Underneath are layers of newspaper clippings about racist terrorism, with a silk stocking stretched over them—an allusion to the girls murdered in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.

He had already escaped from the South by matriculating at Cooper Union, in 1960. In New York, he worked on construction sites, made advertisements for retailers, and embraced the “paint-slinging” style. Huge, explosively colorful canvases, including “NY Battle Ground” (1967) and “King’s Garden #4” (1968)—part of a series dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he’d met in Alabama—gave vivid expression to the era’s turmoil. Yet despite the efforts of Whitten and a few fellow-travellers, such as Norman Lewis and Alma Thomas, formalist ideals and Black politics were oil and water. “The white community, they would just say, ‘Ah, they’re aping white artists,’ ” Whitten recalled. “And from the Black community, ‘Oh, they’re not doing Black art with Black people, so why bother?’ ”

One look at “Atlantis Rising” (1966), executed in broad, chaotic brushstrokes of grayish black, dark violet, and slate blue, is enough to refute both charges. The painting conjures a roiling ocean, as though Whitten—who later became a scuba diver, and enjoyed hunting octopuses—were envisioning a doomsday resurrection of the Middle Passage dead. Nevertheless, he became disenchanted with abstract expressionism, which he began to see as nostalgically tethered to the painter’s touch in a rapidly mechanizing world. For “Light Sheet I” (1969), he constructed a pulley system to screen-print paint through stencils onto an enormous canvas, creating a portal-like pattern of concentric squares in hallucinatory pink and yellow. (It was inspired by a conversation with John Coltrane, whose rapidly stacked chords were known as “sheets of sound.”) Whitten transformed his studio into what he called a “laboratory,” deciding that he would stop painting and start “making paintings.”

He radically pared back his compositions. “I just want a slab of paint,” he decided in 1970, when he built a platform on the floor of his studio and began emptying gallons of acrylic directly onto the canvas. The kaleidoscopic palette gave way to largely monochrome works such as “Four-Wheel Drive”—a striking, circular painting that evokes a vinyl record cut from rose quartz, with a spiral of grooves radiating from its center. Whitten etched them with one of several custom-built tools that he dubbed Developers. Having carefully poured his paint, often in layers of varying hues, he’d drag the instrument over it, “developing” his image in a stroke.