Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / Walk with me, backwards through time. See Jack Whitten painstakingly remove over two thousand tiles of hardened acrylic paint from his canvas. Watch as he assembles them into a large, flat plane, carefully unslices them from tiny squares, and then unsplatters and unpours the black and white paint. We’ve reached that final moment, in 1990, when the idea for The Messenger (for Art Blakey) is alive only in the artist’s mind. It is a fireball that has hurtled through years of searching, experimenting, suffering, loving, being lost, being overlooked, being angry — and now is ready to take hold.
I kept picturing these moments, at the cusp of action, when visiting “The Messenger,” MoMA’s sprawling retrospective of Whitten’s six-decade career, with over 175 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, and dozens of the artist’s handwritten and typed notes and letters. It caught me spellbound and borderline overwhelmed. You witness Whitten’s mind churning — it seems he mused upon everything that crossed his radar. He was a force for upending, restlessly seeking new ways to capture and record what he felt and constantly inventing and reinventing the tools to help him do it. Through his work he compressed time, so you get righteous fury fused with thoughtful deliberation, the Big Bang colliding with the Digital Age.
Whitten was born in 1939 in segregated Bessemer, Alabama, and in 1960 made his way to New York City to study at the Cooper Union. He was the only Black student there. He was active in the civil rights movement, a friend to many artists, musicians and writers, a jazz enthusiast, a teacher, a husband, and a father. I also consider him an alchemist and a poet, tirelessly experimenting with materials and techniques (a stint at the Tuskegee Institute at age 18 sparked his interest in chemistry, philosophy, math and physics) and able to gracefully weave into his art his rich inner and daily life. That’s no easy task.
The earliest works here are haunting, smoky, black, white and gray paintings Whitten made in response to the country’s raging racial violence. Head IV Lynching resembles a blurred photograph, a ghostly portrait in motion. No facial features are discernible, but you sense what’s implied even before you learn the title. As I understand the process, Whitten scraped paint across the surface and, before it dried, pressed a piece of thin mesh into it, allowing the paint to soak through and then removing the excess. The result is a kind of sandwiched grief: on one side a horrific act and, generations later, on our side, its undeniable echo.
The next paintings incorporate screen printing and were so large (nearly 10 x 10 feet) that Whitten had to build a pulley system in his studio to raise and lower the frame. The layered printing reflects a mechanical method that contrasts with the gestural expansion of the unstretched canvas. When he was making this work, in the late 1960s, Whitten began spending summers in Greece, where his wife had roots. View from Aghia Galini seems to capture a rocky formation exploding in floral glory. Paint courses its way across the canvas in every direction, at different speeds and thicknesses, to different effects. The wide arc of Greek history fascinated Whitten. He carved wood he found in Crete and based a painting series on the Greek alphabet.
It was a revelation to me that Whitten began painting with a large squeegee a decade before Gerhard Richter tried his hand at it. In 1970, Whitten devised a 12-foot flat edge (one of several versions of what he referred to as the “Developer”) to push paint across a surface in one fell swoop. He’d positioned objects he called “disruptors” – wire, string, pebbles – on top of or underneath the canvas, altering the trajectory of the paint, saving the excess paint for another painting.
Whitten moved at a fast clip. During a brief residency at the Xerox Corporation he learned about photocopier toner and began playing around with it on paper and canvas. He created totem sculptures inspired by African art, using materials such as wood, nails, feathers, leather, textiles, and glass. He visited and revisited the grid in his paintings, again pressing mesh into wet paint to summon the geometry. He invented a method to make paint sculptural by transforming it into mosaic tiles so that each tile not only bares its history but, when ushered into a new formation, pulsates across a vaster cosmos. He was still painting at age 78, when he died. Everywhere he turned he found something to ignite his imagination.
A Buddhist scholar once told the story of his teacher holding up a beautiful teacup and proclaiming: “To me this cup is already broken. Because I know its fate, I can enjoy it fully here and now. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.” Jack Whitten upended that thought, finding the beauty in what’s broken, and then a way to make it whole.
“Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, NY. Through August 2, 2025
About the author: Natasha Sweeten is terribly excited about her new studio in upstate New York.
Thank you for this , Natasha. I did not know about Jack Whitten, and thanks to you I’ll go visit MoMA and view the exhibition. You’re wonderfully captured the mystical alchemy of artistic creation — all of the influences that combine into a painting, novel or poem. Whitten’s painting is at once cerebral and deliberate. What transpired in his life became part of his life — a brilliant life roughly lived and well reflected. I almost want to touch his work, hoping it will give me the inspiration I need to develop as an artist.