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Apr 23
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Jack Whitten created visionary beauty from righteous anger. Born in Bessemer, Alabama, amid the violence of the segregated South, he joined the Civil Rights movement, then made his way to New York in 1960. There, he decided to become an artist. Through his exploration of materials and tools—from new paints to Afro-combs and electrostatic printing—Whitten invented art-making techniques that were the first of their kind. Through his confrontation with racial prejudice and technological change, he made art matter in a world in turmoil. This retrospective is the first to span all six decades and every medium of Whitten’s innovative practice, and features more than 175 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that illuminate his singular artistic journey.
In the 1970s, Whitten experimented with pulling layers of acrylic paint across a floor-bound canvas in a sweeping movement, producing a luminous, quasi-photographic blur. In the 1990s, he cut hardened sheets of acrylic paint into thousands of mosaic tiles to assemble richly textured paintings that suggest pixels or galaxies. For decades, Whitten spent his summers in Greece, constructing sculptures that fused the arts of Africa and the ancient Mediterranean with contemporary technologies. He often dedicated his works to figures in Black history, as if he were a messenger—and his art a way of sending meaning out into the world. “I am a conduit for the spirit,” he declared. “It flows through me and manifests in the materiality of paint.”
