The Brooklyn Rail

“I have no identity…I realize that I am an artist and the message in me is not for my own personal benefit, nor for any single group of people. I belong to the world. But no one is able to give to the world without knowing his true identity. By understanding my growth in America, and by studying Africa, I feel that this is a giant step toward discovering my identity.”¹

—Jack Whitten, 1964

I write about Jack Whitten’s work with care, humility, and critical rigor, fully mindful that my own positionality differs from the lived and historical experiences his work evokes. Curating Whitten’s retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art allowed me to engage deeply with his practice—through curatorial decisions, technical studies with conservators, and the meticulous calibration of spatial and sonic environments. These experiences shaped how I interpret Whitten’s abstraction as a politically charged, materially experimental, and epistemologically rich practice—one that metabolizes identity, memory, and history through process and form rather than figuration.

The stories Whitten’s works tell—of grief, resistance, and remembrance—were largely absent from the art historical frameworks through which I was first trained. This awareness came later, through the works themselves, which demanded not only to be seen, but felt, wrestled with, and honored. My early education offered limited exposure to the lived and structural realities of anti-Black racism that continue to shape life in the United States—an absence shaped in part by having grown up in Korea, a culturally homogeneous society. It was through art that I first began to confront the political and emotional gravity of these histories.

Representational practices became crucial points of entry, offering forms through which political resistance could take a visible, affective shape. Yet the persistent pressure Whitten faced to produce representational work reveals broader tensions surrounding abstraction’s political legibility and the institutionalization of identity politics in contemporary art. While those frameworks have been vital for recognition and redress, they have at times elevated figuration to a normative expectation—one that risks constraining the field of artistic possibilities. As critics have recently argued, such emphasis may reproduce expectations for narrative clarity, often at the expense of conceptual, material, or formally experimental approaches.

Whitten, however, did not simply resist these constraints; he redefined them. His commitment to abstraction expanded the conceptual and political potential of painting. For Whitten, painting was a dynamic process of emergence—attuned to quantum rhythms, indeterminate systems, and relational space. His alchemized acrylic with salt, ash, rust, chocolate, eggshells, copper, coal, molasses, onion, and other substances, dissolving the boundaries between organic and industrial, body and machine, memory and matter. Cut into tesserae, these hybrid surfaces were assembled and poured into ever-shifting states of becoming—registering both personal memory and collective time at a molecular scale. The mosaic, in Whitten’s hands, became a quantum field: unstable, plural, and vibrational.

From the early 1970s slab paintings to the “Black Monolith” series and the late “Quantum Wall” works, Whitten mobilized abstraction as an instrument of commemoration, cosmology, and technological speculation. He rejected the expectation that Black artistic expression must be immediately legible, choosing instead a language of delay, multiplicity, and encoded meaning. As he famously put it, “Take everything you have ever felt, everything you have ever smelled, every sound you have ever heard, every sensation you have ever had that you have felt through your fingertips. Take all of that and compress it. You would get an understanding of abstraction.” His work invites viewers to a multisensory mode of engagement.² For Whitten, abstraction was never merely formal—it was metaphysical, epistemological, and resolutely political.

Engaging these enduring tensions between figuration and abstraction, visibility and opacity, our twelve thinkers and artists in this issue offer critical meditations on Whitten’s visionary legacy. Together, we ask:

How does the material complexity of Jack Whitten’s practice reflect, engage, or parallel the social complexities of his time and ours? If we understand his artistic process—his experimentation with materials, his techniques of layering, disruption, and recomposition—as a form of inquiry, what kinds of questions does his work pose? What might it mean to locate political agency not in figuration or explicit commentary, but in the structural, tactile, and conceptual strategies embedded within abstraction? How does Whitten’s work reconfigure the relationship between abstraction, history, and personal narrative? And what significance does his legacy hold for contemporary artistic practices and the critical discourses that shape them today?

Richard Shiff observes that Whitten constructs phantom constellations through the emergent logic of tesserae, enacting his conceptual mantra: “mind as matter.” Andrianna Campbell-Lafleur explores his sculptural works as phenomenological containers of spirit and memory, shaped by Mediterranean and diasporic temporalities. Andrea Achi situates his practice within the lineage of Byzantine mosaics, where each acrylic fragment becomes a diasporic unit of cultural continuity. Allison K. Young invokes Jacques Derrida’s hauntology to frame Whitten’s spectral abstraction as a response to racial terror that withholds figuration while conjuring presence. Annissa Malvoisin explores his material crossings—from afro-pick rakes to nkisi-inflected sculptures—as diasporic cartographies that dissolve disciplinary and geographic boundaries. Helina Metaferia honors Whitten’s commemorative abstractions as altars of grief and reverence, linking his gestures to her own embodied process of making.

Interpreting Whitten’s “confusion of imagery” through Friedrich Kittler’s media theory, Erich Kessel frames his abstraction as a response to digitized transmission and the erosion of medium specificity. Ashanté Kindle reads his material practice as one of spiritual protest and Black multiplicity, where opacity and refusal operate as modes of resistance demanding contemplative engagement. Adebunmi Gbadebo addresses Whitten as an ancestral Egun, whose tesserae function as devotional technologies—bridging minkisi, memory, and sonic resonance. Drew Thompson focuses on the afro pick as a painterly and political tool, connecting Whitten’s non-figurative method to Black photographic legibility and historical rupture. Darla Migan draws fierce connections between lynching, material violence, and light, positioning Whitten’s works as both commemorative acts and refusals of sanitized historical narrative. Finally, TK Smith, writing through grief, calls Whitten a teacher and alchemist, asking how material can be pushed toward the unknown: “Art is the compass to the cosmos.”

In assembling these contributions, I wanted to examine Whitten’s abstraction as a critical proposition—one that compels us to reconsider how we define political agency in art. His works resist interpretive closure. Instead, they enact a politics of multiplicity, where meaning unfolds through accumulation, vibration, and entanglement. Whitten’s abstraction continues to resonate as both legacy and provocation—challenging not only what art can represent, but what it can do.