The Brooklyn Rail

Byzantine mosaics flicker with light and wonder, animating the surfaces of churches across Italy, Greece, and the eastern Mediterranean. Distinctively crafted to be viewed from a distance, these works come alive through their shimmering tesserae, merging painterly qualities with a striking sense of dimensionality. They evoke awe and spirituality, qualities that continue to inspire today. This essay explores Jack Whitten’s engagement with the form and conceptual legacy of Byzantine art, particularly mosaics and icons, which adorned both secular and ecclesiastical spaces. Byzantine art forges powerful links between past and present, and it is through this lineage that Whitten’s own experimental practice finds a profound and resonant dialogue.

Jack Whitten’s tesserae paintings, developed during the final decades of his life, offer a profound meditation on lineage and the persistence of material traditions. Much like Byzantine mosaicists, who assembled fragments of gold and glass to craft luminous images, Whitten’s labor-intensive process of slicing, composing, and layering acrylic tesserae articulates a non-linear history shaped by fragmentation, survival, and renewal. Whitten himself spoke candidly about the deep impact of Byzantine mosaics on his artistic formation. His works, composed of painted tesserae, reference the material structure of mosaic while expanding its expressive capacities. They are not mosaics in the traditional sense, but paintings that adopt the mosaic’s conceptual framework as a metaphor for memory, continuity, and spiritual reflection. For Whitten, this engagement was neither superficial nor stylistic; rather, it constituted a conscious invocation of historical and cultural memory. Whereas Byzantine mosaics have long been recognized for their painterly qualities, Whitten’s practice reverses the relationship: his paintings perform as mosaics, reimagining the possibilities of medium and form. Whitten’s mosaic technique offers a rich metaphor for the diasporic condition. Each tile is a fragment—cast, cut, and recombined. The act of meticulously embedding each unit into a larger constellation evokes the labor of collective memory, where survival depends not upon seamless continuity but upon adaptive preservation. In this way, Whitten’s paintings align profoundly with the temporalities of Byzantine mosaics, which themselves often served as visual repositories of both sacred history and rupture.

Whitten’s work has shown how the visual language and conceptual framework of Byzantium, especially its treatment of sacred space, ritual form, and cultural exchange, continue to resonate in contemporary practice. Jack Whitten’s For J.M.B. (1988), for example, evokes the visual and spiritual legacy of Byzantine icons through both its material construction and its conceptual intentions. Set within a luminous gold-leaf frame, a direct nod to the sacred framing devices of Byzantine icons, the work centers a dense, textured field of collaged acrylic, punctuated by a photographic image of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Much like a Byzantine icon, where gold backgrounds signify the otherworldly and the eternal, Whitten’s gilded surface transforms the portrait of Basquiat into a site of reverence and memory, situating him within a timeless, transcendent space.

The physical surface itself, with its layered and encrusted textures, parallels the aged, tactile qualities of Byzantine micro-mosaic icon panels that have survived centuries of veneration. Whitten’s use of everyday materials embedded into the surface reflects his deep engagement with the idea that memory and spirit can be physically present within matter—a sensibility also at the heart of Byzantine artistic practice, where materials were understood to mediate divine presence.

In For J.M.B., Whitten does not merely memorialize Basquiat; he canonizes him, offering a contemporary icon that links the artistic lineage of Black creativity to orthodox traditions of sanctity and remembrance. Through the fusion of sacred form and experimental materiality, Whitten crafts a moving meditation on art’s capacity to honor, mourn, and transcend.

Through layering, disruption, and recomposition, he built paintings that hold complexity without collapsing it, enacting resistance through material and formal innovation. His surfaces shimmer with the labor of memory, making visible the work of reconstruction that history demands.

Likewise, Spiral: A Dedication to R. Bearden (1988) stands as a moving tribute from Jack Whitten to his mentor and friend Romare Bearden, a towering figure in American art who profoundly influenced Whitten’s early career. Much like Bearden, who famously drew upon the visual languages of Byzantine mosaics and iconography in his own work, Whitten channels the structural and conceptual power of mosaic into this dense, richly textured composition. Here, layers of acrylic fragments and embedded imagery swirl together in a vibrant field, recalling the intricate assembling of tesserae in Byzantine surfaces.

Whitten’s use of collage-like techniques, built from discrete yet interconnected fragments, echoes Bearden’s signature approach to narrative construction and points toward the historical depth of mosaic as a medium of memory and visual storytelling. For both artists, Byzantine art was not merely a historical reference but a living tradition that demonstrated how brokenness and assembly could coalesce into profound expressions of cultural continuity and spiritual reflection.

Whitten’s embrace of Byzantine visual culture also expands our understanding of how medieval Mediterranean forms can resonate across geographies and centuries. His works are not acts of nostalgic recovery; they are dynamic translations, bringing the sacred ethos of Byzantine art into dialogue with diasporic, postmodern realities. Just as Byzantine icons mediated between human and divine, Whitten’s works mediate between past and future, personal grief and collective hope. His tesserae shimmer with a temporal dissonance, at once ancient and futurist.

In considering Jack Whitten’s dialogue with Byzantine art, we come to understand his work as a profound reimagining of how memory, material, and history are made visible. Whitten’s paintings do not merely reference the forms of mosaic or icon; they embody their conceptual and spiritual possibilities, transforming Byzantine strategies of assembly and fragmentation into contemporary acts of cultural and personal testimony.

Through his meticulous, experimental approach, Whitten bridges temporal and geographic distances, drawing Byzantium into conversation with diasporic experience and postmodern abstraction. In doing so, he reminds us that the sacred is not confined to the past, nor is history a completed narrative. Rather, both remain active fields, shifting, shimmering, requiring our continued labor and imagination.

Jack Whitten’s engagement with Byzantine visual language illuminates how abstraction itself can serve as a vessel for cultural memory, spiritual reflection, and political agency. His legacy challenges contemporary practice to recognize the profound capacities of form, surface, and material to bear the weight of history, and to offer new, luminous visions for the future. In Whitten’s hands, every fragment becomes a site of potential: a reminder that from the broken pieces of our collective and individual pasts, we might still build something whole, resonant, and radiant.