Jack Whitten: The Messenger
Pebbles on the Street
Jack Whitten. Atopolis: For Édouard Glissant. 2014. Acrylic on canvas, eight panels. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Sid R. Bass, Lonti Ebers, Agnes Gund, Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis, Jerry Speyer and Katherine Farley, and Daniel and Brett Sundheim. © 2025 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar
By Elga Wimmer
April 11, 2025
Walking into Jack Whitten’s expansive retrospective, The Messenger, on view through August 2, 2025, at MoMA, New York, I had the feeling of walking into an inner sanctum. I felt a tangible spiritual ambience. The exhibition begins with his sculptures, reminiscent of African ceremonial objects, symbols of authority as well as embodiments of the spirits of ancestors. The show’s title, Jack Whitten: The Messenger, suggests a being coming from another time, acting as the bearer of remnants of that other long lost world, as Greek mythological messenger of the Gods, Hermes, carried out errands between the divine realm and mortals. Whitten taps into the past and transforms relationships between art, memory and society.
The retrospective, curated by Michelle Kuo, MoMA’s Chief Curator at Large and Publisher, is organized into several of the museum’s cavernous galleries on the 6th floor, the first of which focuses on Whitten’s sculptures, followed by a presentation of his paintings from the 1960’s, which seem to be autobiographical. An acrylic on canvas, Light Sheet, 1969, visualizes the music of John Coltrane, who along with his brother Tommy Whitten, also a jazz musician, Whitten watched play every night for a week. In this work, Whitten transposes the concept of a sound wave into sheets of light by pressing layers of acrylic paint through mesh, a process similar to silk screening. The result is cascades of color channeled into planes of light. Another painting from the same year, View from Aghia Galini, (acrylic and pencil on canvas), references a fishing village and the mountainous area of Aghia Galini in Crete, where the artist and his family went every year for the summer. Together with Light Sheet, this is one of Whitten’s most colorful and harmonious paintings, rendered in shades of blue and pink, with white mountain tops evoking the unique beauty of Greece in the summer. In the following rooms the weight of history comes to bear; the choice of materials grows darker, heavier.
Jack Whitten grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s American South, which was still largely segregated, before the Civil Rights Movement got traction. When asked what he remembered from his early youth, Whitten recalls a de facto apartheid society, attending separate schools assigned by race, eating in separate restaurants, being treated essentially as a noncitizen. He would find his way to New York in the early 1960’s, where he set up his studio in Lower Manhattan. These were exciting times for an artist in New York when many of today’s artist luminaries got their start living and working downtown.
Whitten was an innovator, exploring what he could do with the new medium of acrylic paint. He tried different methods of making art, adding layer upon layer, scratching the surface, adding layers, then overlaying, playing with the focal plane, sometimes leaving a glimpse, like an archeologist’s. He constructed what looked like a huge lawn rake, which he called “Developer,” – seen in the exhibition – and dragged it across his paintings, while some of the layers were still wet, thus creating a blur effect, leaving slight openings to the layers below the surface. These layers upon layers create history upon history. Some of the paintings look like out of focus photographs, such as Bessemer Dreamer, (1986, acrylic and mixed media on canvas). In this regard, the paintings are comparable to Gerhard Richter’s diffused, deliberately out of focus imagery.
In a sense, many of Whitten’s paintings have the textural quality of sculptures. He utilized what he refers to as “ready news,” globs of paint put aside for later use. He wanted to create a puzzle for the viewer. Always experimenting, he would create ripples formed in wet paper to evoke the appearance of an organic, living life form. Whitten would also staple wire hangers below the canvas, giving the painting the texture of a relief, a landscape.
I had the opportunity to visit Jack Whitten in his New York studio in the early 1990’s. He was excited to show me the process, how he made his latest painting. He would take a canvas still wet with thick layers of dark acrylic paint, and toss it onto the rough pavement of the street in front of his studio, letting the street make an imprint on the canvas. Whitten made use of whatever material he came across or even invented. Much like Willem de Kooning, who would experiment with safflower oil, kerosene and mayonnaise as binding agents, in mixing his paints, he used graphite, aluminum powder, gesso, black pigment, acrylic gel, in his own concoctions making paintings that were in effect, urban abstraction.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York, which radically changed Lower Manhattan, and which Whitten experienced in person, he stopped painting for several years. He would eventually create a powerful monument to the tragic events of that day, a twenty-foot long mural titled, 9-11-01, which he completed in 2006. This large-scale painting, one of the most impressive works in the exhibition at MoMA, is composed of thousands of tiles of acrylic paint that incorporate symbolic materials recalling that day, such as ash and dust. About the work, Whitten commented, “Through memory we reconstruct our past. We honor the dead through memory.”
This sentiment also resonates in such paintings as Homecoming: For Miles, (1992), and Martin Luther King’s Garden, (1968). Whitten, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 78 took a scientific approach to making art, always experimenting with new materials. In this regard, he was a cosmologist, studying the universe, its origin and evolution. There is a sense of the universe in his work, underscoring the reality that all people are in the same cosmos, belonging together.