The title of Willie Birch’s solo exhibition at Fort Gansevoort, Up on the Roof, is partly descriptive of the artist’s 2022 work, Two Roofers and a Ladder. Here, the artist honors the dignity of physical labor, elevating those who toil to maintain our built environment to near-heroic heights.

Jacques Derrida coined the term hauntology to describe the ways in which the past lingers into the present. I’m compelled by this term’s relevance to Whitten’s practice, not only in its aesthetic implications of spectral presences that are clearly perceptible across his work, but also in how it resonates with his impulse to variously exorcise, confront, mask, or suppress the traumas of racial terror that permeate American history.