The Brooklyn Rail

If you are like me, you were vibrating with excitement at the prospect of seeing Jack Whitten’s first comprehensive retrospective, an exhibition showcasing every medium of his innovative practice over nearly six decades through more than 175 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, as well as objects and ephemera, that highlight the arc of his artistic journey. You are likely most familiar with the titular “Slab” paintings of the 1970s, abstractions for which the artist developed a tool to rake and drag paint across the canvas, turning acrylic into something akin to a photographic blur or the grooves of a vinyl record spinning on a phonograph. If you are like me, you probably deepened your admiration for Whitten’s innovative practice as you marveled at early works created before he abandoned the use of discernable figures, saw the cross-cultural connections in the construction of his sculptures, and followed his love for acrylic paint through new methods that made it appear like soft, shimmery fabric in one moment and mosaic tile in the next.

The Messenger does not feel like a standard retrospective, although it is mostly presented like one. But here, chronology takes on new meaning, as it allows us to make connections that reveal how Whitten’s ideas developed, blooming from one foundational form and shifting into another. Chronology gives us a thematic throughline, though Whitten’s fundamentals don’t necessarily change: acrylic medium supported by canvas and eventually other flat surfaces, elements drawn from global culture, most notably from Africa and Greece, and his imagination working through material to visualize the world and create his own kind of cosmos. MoMA’s Chief Curator at Large and Publisher Michelle Kuo and her team have created a narrative out of objects, processes, and ephemera that provide a comprehensive view of the depth and breadth of the artist’s work, helping viewers gain new insight into Whitten’s artistic evolution.

Born in 1939 in Bessemer, Alabama, Jack Whitten was the son of a coal miner and a seamstress who later opened a kindergarten. A painting by James Monroe Cross, his mother’s first husband, was part of the family’s living room decor and provided Jack with early exposure to the arts. While attending segregated schools of the Jim Crow South, he excelled in the arts and sciences, eventually going on to play tenor saxophone in his junior high school marching band and gain exposure to jazz through the music of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. He earned money by hand-lettering signs for local businesses, and his first artistic commission—a poster depicting a Black man in chains—was undertaken for the civil rights activist Asbury Howard. Whitten’s image was used in a protest on the steps of the Bessemer county courthouse, igniting a passion for social justice and activism in the young artist. By the mid-1950s, Whitten was attending the Tuskegee Institute (now University) to study on the pre-medical track and was a cadet in the Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC).

While at Tuskegee, Whitten met Langston Hughes, who was an artist-in-residence, and he made his first visit to New York the summer of 1958. Before leaving Southern University to study art at the Cooper Union, Whitten organized a protest march and sit-down demonstrations with other students. When the artist began his studies at the Cooper Union in 1960 under the tutelage of printmaker Robert Blackburn, sculptor Leo Amino, and others, it was his first experience of an integrated classroom.

Whitten befriended many figures who we now consider luminaries in New York’s vibrant art scene—Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, Jasper Johns, Nam June Paik, Alan Kaprow, to name a few—while traversing the boroughs to hear jazz musicians honing their techniques. Whitten’s early work is imbued with the energetic mix of artistic movements and styles that circulated throughout the city in those years: Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, figuration, Fluxus, performance and happenings, music.

Most of the works in The Messenger feel kinetic, not only due to Whitten’s constant quest to create new painting techniques, but also because of the rapidly changing times in which he carried out his work. Whitten lived through several monumental social movements and technological innovations, from the fight for civil rights and desegregation and the global power shifts of the Cold War to the rise of the internet, the September 11 attacks, and the election of President Barack Obama. In many ways, Whitten’s art feels like the manifestation of a desire to reflect what he was experiencing—what he was seeing—and to keep up.

“The image is photographic; therefore, I must photograph my thoughts,” Whitten painted on the wall of his Lispenard Street studio in 1964. The following year, he began making his first “process works,” gray paintings with specter-like gradients that he also described as being like “fuzzy photographs.” Atlantis Rising (1966) appears like a cousin of the process works, its haunted traces, sharp vertical movement, and atmospheric intimations in conversation with the fuzz. A gray landscape is interrupted by pops and swirls of purple, some of which are seemingly dragged in a vertical motion with a palette knife. Like Plato’s literary creation, Whitten’s Atlantis implies foreboding and uncertainty, and yet early works like this one pushed Whitten to find a confident and entirely new way of expression. “I just want a slab of paint,” and “I make a painting not paint a painting,” he wrote in his studio log. For much of the next decade, Whitten would do just that. Works from the 1970s, such as Prime Mover and Sorcerer’s Apprentice (both 1974) which are part of his “Cold War” series, began to use “disruptors,” objects such as stones or wires, that Whitten placed strategically beneath the canvas to leave an impression as his developer raked over them, creating another “layer” or “color” for the painted slab. With these subtle touches, Whitten beckons the viewer closer, encouraging them to notice fine detail and examine the work from every angle possible. In Black Table Setting (Homage to Duke Ellington) (1974), close inspection of the canvas shows a distinct line on the left side, a start or stop point for the developer tool that dragged the paint.

Gridded works from the late 1970s, such as The Annunciation XIV (1979), found the artist pressing acrylic paint through mesh like a sieve to add vertical motion to the horizontal blurs of his slab works. Even as he began to perceive color in different ways thanks to this process, Whitten still experimented with visual effects he could create with his trusty developer tool. Ascension I (1979) dabbles in Op art through its composition of diagonal squares rendered in gray, black, and white with a dusting of electric orange, purple, and yellow-green. If you are like me, you might wonder if the squares on the canvas are moving or if it’s just your eyes playing tricks on you because you’ve stared long enough.

An artist who thought of his works as portals to other worlds, Whitten often returned to his love for science fiction, music, and technology for inspiration. In the 1990s, he began using broken shards of acrylic pigment, arranging the pieces into mesmerizing images like the tesserae works Einstein’s Violin (for Martha Graham) (1991), Totem 2000 VI Annunciation: For John Coltrane (2000), and Apps for Obama (2011). Monumental series (such as the “Greek Alphabet” paintings), Whitten’s sculptures, and the many works he made in tribute to friends and historical figures round out the show, and there is indeed much to behold. A particular delight is seeing many of the self-portraits Whitten made across the decades; one from 2014 is a standout, appearing at first as a whirling constellation, until a little distance reveals the artist’s characteristic afro-framed face.

In The Messenger, Whitten’s love of material and craft is made clear through a small surprise or discovery embedded in a painting or sculpture, the hint of an epiphany in a studio log or a casual photo of a family vacation. Whitten did receive recognition in his lifetime, though not nearly as much as his transformative impact on the postwar art scene might suggest. If you are like me, you will take a full afternoon or plan more than one trip to see this exhibition. These works reward slow looking. And no matter the year or subject, Whitten’s work remains a fruitful site of play, improvisation, experimentation, grounding, reverence, and convergence, an outlet for all the expressive vulnerability, emotion, and meaning his body could hold.