“I’m a product of American Apartheid,” the artist Jack Whitten wrote, a blunt fact that led him to project, in his art, a very different reality, one of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” It was a vision that propelled and buoyed him through a nearly six-decade career. “This is why I get up in the morning,” he wrote, “and go to work!”
And how very lucky we are, at a moment when references to diversity and difference are being scrubbed from accounts of our national history, to have a refreshing tidal wave of a Whitten career retrospective sweeping and scintillating through the special exhibition galleries on the Museum of Modern Art’s sixth floor.
Titled “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” the show encompasses some 180 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, from a 1963 art-school collage to a final painting from just before he died in 2018. Over that span Whitten called every studio he worked in a “laboratory,” and every piece of art he made an “experiment.” And, indeed, much of what’s in the show challenges ready definition.
Such is the case with a piece called “The Messenger (for Art Blakey)” installed just outside the first gallery. From a distance it could be a photograph of a star-drenched night sky, or of clouds of foam on a dark sea. Or it could a painting with white paint glopped and dripped, Abstract Expressionist-style, on a black ground. Get close and you find that, in fact, it’s a large rough-textured mosaic pieced together from thousands of pixel-like cubes of dried paint.
You consult the title for meaning: Art Blakey, Black drummer extraordinaire, leader in the 1950s of the hardbop group called the Jazz Messengers. Suddenly the glops and drips look sonic, like musical bursts and pings.
So what, exactly, do you have here? Astral vistas and Atlantic crossings. Jazz and Jackson Pollock. A painting that’s built, not brushed. An art whose messages are historical, mystical, personal, by a radically inventive artist who ranks right at the top of abstraction’s pantheon, as will become clear in the exhibition ahead.
Whitten was born in Bessemer, Ala., in the Jim Crow South, in 1939. His father was a coal miner, his mother a seamstress, whose first husband, James Monroe Cross, had been an amateur painter of local scenes. Early on, Whitten knew he too wanted to be an artist, though it took a while to make the move. In the late 1950s, he immersed himself in civil rights activism — he met Martin Luther King Jr., in Montgomery — until, feeling battered by the experience of violence, he left the South.
He headed to New York City. There he studied at Cooper Union, and became interested in abstract art. He forged friendships with painters of an older generation, Willem de Kooning and Norman Lewis among them. He hung out with younger abstract artists — Melvin Edwards, Al Loving, William T. Williams — who were, like him, looking to make work that was culturally and politically “Black” without being overtly polemical.
The art form that seemed to do that most successfully was jazz. Once an aspiring musician himself, Whitten always claimed it as a crucial influence. And he got his fill of it in the downtown clubs where Blakey, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk — he knew them all — regularly played. (All four can be heard on an ambient soundtrack in MoMA’s galleries.)
And from the start he was experimenting. A 1967 oil painting called “NY Battle Ground” — the reference is to civil rights and antiwar protests in the city — is explosively painterly in a classic Ab-Ex way. But already, in “Birmingham 1964,” he had produced, from aluminum foil, stretched stocking and torn newsprint, a grief-and-fury-filled assemblage-style memorial to the 1964 church bombing that resulted in the deaths of four African American girls. And in the same year he had combined a screen-printing process and acrylic paint to create a ghostly photographic-looking image called “Head IV Lynching.”
Whitten would make acrylic paint, not yet in wide use, his medium of choice. And, in an effort to cut loose from conventional painting styles that privileged the artist’s “touch,” he found ways to physically distance himself from his work. An older African American painter Ed Clark (1926-2019) had pioneered this gambit earlier by painting with a janitor’s push broom. Whitten took the technology further by inventing instruments from scratch, among them a 12-foot-wide version of a squeegee or rake — he called it the “Developer” — with which he could apply a wide layer of paint to a horizontal canvas.
Beginning in 1974, he used the instrument — an original version is propped against a wall — to produce a series of paintings he referred to as “slabs.” Each painting consisted of several successive layers of paint with drying times of varying lengths between applications. In a finishing gesture, he dragged the squeegee, in one quick stroke, across the top of the “slab” to uncover the layers beneath, a process he likened to the exposure of film to light in photography.
The chromatic and textural variety achieved is truly virtuosic, both in the original 1974 series and in the variations that followed as he shifted his palette from color to black and white; his abstract mode from quasi-gestural to geometric; and the method of making the painting from horizontal to vertical orientation.
All of this would probably have been enough to establish and sustain a long career, but big changes were still to come. New media arrived. After an artist residency at the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, N.Y., Whitten started painting and drawing with photocopy toner on paper. And after establishing a pattern of spending summers in Greece — the home of his wife Mary’s parents — he focused his time there on producing an extraordinary body of African-inspired sculptures, carved from local wood and embedded with nails, tools and electronic detritus.
In 1980, Whitten’s TriBeCa studio was destroyed in a fire, and while renovating a new one he stopped making art for three years. When he began again it was with a set of newly invented forms and techniques. And from this point on an already powerful exhibition — organized by Michelle Kuo, chief curator at large, with an all-MoMA team led by Dana Liljegren with Helena Klevorn — lifts off into the stratosphere.
The innovations were of two related kinds, both of which involved turning acrylic paint into a sculptural material. Using paint he made casts of objects he found on New York City streets — bottle caps, tire treads, manhole covers — and attached these casts, assemblage-style, to canvases or wood panels. The culminating work in this format is a 20-foot-long mural-like memorial to the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, an event that Whitten witnessed firsthand.
A pyramidal pileup of molds of shoes and glass and metal shards mixed with ash and dirt from the site, the piece has the entrapping weight of a PTSD nightmare and is as powerful a response to a still unthinkable event as I’ve seen in art.
Actually, much of Whitten’s art, starting with the 1964 Birmingham assemblage, is commemorative. And with another formal innovation, the use of acrylic mosaic, he introduced a versatile language for such content. You find it in pieces dedicated to the artist’s mother and father, and in an exuberant 1998 shout out — an image of a sleek blackbird rocketing skyward —- to the irrepressible jazz singer Betty Carter, who died that year. And it has its most dramatic expression in the series of tributes called “Black Monoliths” that appeared from the late 1980s through the end of the artist’s life.
These are dedicated to individual figures who shaped Whitten, either from a distance as public figures (Muhammad Ali, Representative Barbara Jordan), or through personal acquaintance. There’s Jacob Lawrence, who mentored the young artist with career and life advice in New York. And James Baldwin, who showed him how to make Black identity and creativity one thing. And Ornette Coleman, one of the musicians who gave Whitten ways to connect, in what we might now call an Afrofuturistic approach, abstraction to science, politics and spirituality.
The twilit gallery where the “Monoliths” hang, black and glowing with their admixtures of bright-color tesserae and pearlescent dust, may be the single most beautiful room of contemporary art in any New York City museum right now. And the work in it defines the idea of identity in the way the introductory Blakey tribute does: as inclusive and expansive, cosmic and specific, monumental and molecular.
Whitten spoke, with wishful optimism, of wanting to be an artist-citizen of the world, a world in which “there is no race, no color, no gender, no territorial hangups, no religion, no politics. There is only life.” Life is what this great show of his fantastically inventive art is filled with.
Jack Whitten: The Messenger
Through Aug. 2, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, (212) 708-9400; moma.org.
