The Brooklyn Rail

As I’m writing this essay, I am sitting in my art residency studio, located in the World Trade Center, with the 9/11 Memorial visible from my window. I can’t help but think about Jack Whitten’s painting, 9.11.01 (2006), which he spent five years working on after witnessing the Twin Towers falling down from his Tribeca studio. After experiencing that devastation, Whitten could only bring himself to work on that one artwork during that period, and it became the largest and most ambitious work of his career.

Witnessing that painting in person at Jack Whitten: The Messenger, the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective on Whitten’s work, was transformative for me. It’s made from pigs blood, ash, hair, acrylic, and salvaged items from Ground Zero. But most importantly, it’s born from a sensitive response to a traumatizing moment in our collective history. The amount of care, attention to detail, precision, and commitment required to make that work is a testament to Whitten’s mastery. This painting honors not a single figure, but the three thousand lives lost in a single tragedy. And it was necessary.

There’s a poetic irony in writing an homage to Whitten—an artist who dedicated much of his own career to commemorating others. At times the memorials he made feel haunting, such as in Sandbox: For the Children of Sandy Hook Elementary School (2013), which he created on behalf of the students and teachers killed during the December 14, 2012 school shooting. In the painting, abstracted toy sandboxes appear abandoned, arranged in a neatly formed grid structure, unnatural and unplayed with.

Other works feel more celebratory. Though Whitten struggled to gain consistent recognition during his lifetime, he devoted much of his studio practice to honoring the visionary artists, thinkers, and civil rights luminaries who shaped his era. I relished in spending time in the museum’s galleries with Homage to Malcolm (1970), Spiral: A Dedication to R. Bearden (1988), and Homecoming: For Miles (1992). Whitten made artistic tributes to influential mentors, friends, and people he admired from a distance who were instrumental in moving Black culture and politics forward.

“I am a conduit for the spirit,” Whitten said in an interview. “It flows through me and manifests in the materiality of paint.” At first those paintings began with the representation of the face—in fact, many faces—such as in The Blacks (1963), or Jug Head 1 (1965). Eventually, Whitten took toward abstraction as a way to resolve the complexities inherent in portraiture. Through technically inventive paintings and sculptures, Whitten made us rethink what we know about public figures, calling forward new information from the recently deceased, with the intuition of a spiritual medium, a channel—and yes, a messenger.

My own artistic practice is, like Whitten’s early work, shaped by many faces, collaged from historical archives in an effort to uphold the legacies of modern day women activists. One thing I have learned about making compelling portraits of people is that it requires you to unearth something about the subject that is beyond the obvious. As a leading figure in Black abstraction, Whitten thrived in the arena of the subversive. He displayed his reverence toward people that left a mark in this world by, in turn, making his own marks, produced from rigorous studio experimentation.

Like Whitten, I make large works on the floor. Currently laid across half of my studio is a mural sized homage I’m building to three seated female activists, with archives from 1960s sit-in protests adorning them. I’ve come to learn that there’s something bodily that happens when you begin scaling up your art and work on the ground, moving around your materials and the object you are creating with all your physicality. I feel a simpatico between my own sprawling studio dance, as I picture Whitten reaching long and wide, using an Afro pick to comb through layers of acrylic paint, each line made steady through his dedicated craftsmanship. Although he eventually strayed from representing the figure in his practice, both the bodies of Whitten and those he honored in his portraits are made present with the somatic gestures found within his art. The effects are visceral, palpable, and deeply imbued in his work.

As a fellow artist, professor, and activist who is also living and working in New York City, I feel a kinship toward Whitten’s path. I admire the way he vulnerably alchemizes our collective pain into art as alters of hope. We are now in an era where much hope is needed, with an authoritarian regime threatening to interfere with powerful museum exhibitions like this one from occurring.

While walking through the rooms of Whitten’s retrospective, I found myself trying to decode his art even further. What’s the message, Jack? Any spiritual guidance from the messenger in these times of despair will do.

If Whitten were alive today, he’d likely be making art in response to our moment, compelling us all to see beyond binaries, beneath the surface. He was always pushing the genres of paint and sculpture into the transdisciplinary—where the spiritual, political, and aesthetic are not separate realms but one seamless gesture of resistance. I suspect Whitten would be making a monumental masterpiece honoring someone who recently transitioned from this earth yet served this world selflessly while they were alive. Yet, at this juncture, the world is recognizing Whitten’s own generous spirit as an artist and celebrating him.

Finally.