The Brooklyn Rail

Dear Jack,

There’s something that happens when in the presence of your work. As my eyes scan surfaces disturbed by Afro picks and constructed by tesserae, I feel like I am teleporting into another world. A portal, you called it. I always felt your works far exceed the photograph. It commands another dimension—a fourth one—that can’t be captured in two. Maybe it’s the sole of your shoe that lingers in the paint, or the souls of Malcolm, Martin, Baldwin, Amadou, Jacob, Amiri, Ornette, Maya, Duke, Muhammad, and Miles that you infused into each acrylic chip. Like a phantom limb, only felt—but not seen. “You see that bucket of paint over there? Barbara Jordan is in that bucket,” you said when discussing Black Monolith III (For Barbara Jordan) (1998).

When I leaned in close to The Messenger (For Art Blakey) (1990)​, I could hear the rhythms of Blakey’s drum radiate in squares of black and white. “If the painting can produce sound therefore it can learn to talk I.E., language…. Remember the African talking drum.” There’s Mooyo [spirit] in your work. But some of these spirits, they haunt. I see it in Head IV Lynching (1964), as though you captured the shadow of a strung head softly kissing your canvas floor. I see Emmett’s face within those swirls of grey.

I read about these spirits in your Notes From the Woodshed in 1968, reflecting on the sixties: the death of your brother Tommy, the four little girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, the assassinations of Martin, Malcolm, the Kennedy brothers, Vietnam, the Black uprisings. You wrote about those spirits that seemed to linger and haunt. “For the first time in my life I experienced the absence of hope… My paintings became violent. It became harder to control my emotions; even hate had entered my vocabulary… penetrated my psyche… How can anyone justify staying in the studio when people are dying?”

I know this question. I asked it in 2020, living in the wake of George Floyd’s public execution, witnessing millions of people drop dead of COVID like locust bugs devouring Egypt, hearing Black Lives Matter protesters demanding the end of Black genocide. But I felt your question most when my mother, grandmother, grandfather, and uncle all died within that year. My 2020 was your 1968. I, too, felt the haunting of grief and death pecking away at my sanity.

Something changed for you that year—for me too. I learned how to take plantation earth, saturated with the blood and flesh of my Egún, and make it mine. And you, it was like you mastered how to gather up those spirits that haunted you, driving them into each acrylic tesserae like how you drive a nail into your minkisi carvings. How did you learn how to be a conjurer? Was it the dream you had in 1968? That dream that commanded you to find a tree in Greece and carve it into a totem? And when you found that tree, you carved it and wrote, “I was still intact, much stronger, braver. Greece has restored my sanity and I was ready for a new chapter.” And after you carved that tree into a totem, you birthed the “Developer,” inventing ways to stretch acrylic in a single stroke. You got more experimental, your compositions more abstract. Then you birthed the tesserae, imbuing acrylic paint with length, width, height, and the souls of our Black folk.

Since you said, “My carvings have definitely influenced my paintings,” and minkisi have directly influenced your carvings, are your paintings a technological invention that links minkisi directly to your paintings? Similarly to how anthropologist John Michael Vlach views the minkisi to the Edgefield face jugs “end points of a stylistic continuum stretching the breadth of the ocean?”

On March 5, 2008, when you wrote, “For me, my intentions are based upon a specific art historicalness: SLAVERY SEVERED MY AFRICAN ROOTS. Since then I have been actively reconstructing my roots,” I felt you stretching across the Atlantic, reconstructing our roots one acrylic pixel at a time. On February 9, 2001, you called your paintings “devotional objects beyond merely decorative, elegant designs. A bridge to the unknown.” On March 10, 2001, your grids, “straight out of nature, therefore straight out of Africa.” On February 29, 2000, you wrote, “the painting is finished when the spirit enters,” and “portals to another world.”

Did you know you were describing minkisi? Minkisi are our portal to our ancestors. They are devotional objects, the repository for mooyo. Isn’t that “Black Monolith?” The white kaolin clay in the minkisi is used to facilitate communications between the living and the dead. Reminds me of your white tessera. The same white kaolin in the mouth and eyes of face jugs found on gravesites across the South. Those face jugs sure do look like Ancestral Totem (1968), or Jug Head I and II (both 1965). Did you know minkisi literally means medicine? Was this the medicine you needed in Greece when you carved that tree?

In the presence of your work, I see the “history of a people … uprooted, torn + dismembered, piece by piece, fragmented, + scattered to various geographical locations … adrift in the MIDDLE PASSAGE.” Your work is a reclamation of our past, a reimagining of our futures one nail and tessera at a time. What you did with this Western invention of acrylic paint far transcends making acrylic paint sculptural, or building a painting. Jack Whitten, YOU invented a way to make acrylic paint our minkisi.