As he has proved to be one of the most inventive and unique abstract painters in the United States, a proper retrospective of Jack Whitten’s work has been long overdue. Whitten always embraced and adapted new technologies as materials, tools, and metaphors in his practice. In an interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, Whitten explained “My metaphors are found in scientific processes.”¹ He believed that we live in a scientific age and that art should reflect the time it was made in. On display throughout the exhibition were the wide array of tools which Whitten built himself in order to achieve the unique surfaces of his paintings. These tools dictated the aesthetics of Whitten’s paintings. He was endlessly creative—from his earliest forays into painting to his later mosaic works. “Jack Whitten: The Messenger”documents the evolution of an artist who reinvented painting again and again from the discovery of his unique style of painting in the 1960s to his innovative smeared acrylic works made between the 1970s and 1980s to his final mosaic inspired body of work which he labored on until his death in 2018.

        In his initial paintings, Whitten used all manner of approaches and materials, but with a decidedly political bent. A searing quote included in didactic text sums up Whitten’s intentions as an artist: “My paintings are designed as weapons; their objective is to penetrate and destroy the Western aesthetic. Their final objective is political in nature.” He mixed figuration and abstraction, struggling to find a way of assimilating his political ideas with his technical skill. Born in Bessemer, AL, under what Whitten referred to as the “American apartheid” of segregation, he was politically radicalized at a young age. A meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. compelled Whitten to participate in marches and protests for civil rights.² These experiences demonstrably shaped his early work.

        As Whitten grew into his multifaceted style, his political intentions became less heavy-handed and obvious. He turned to abstraction in an attempt to craft a new culture for Black Americans. He wrote in his journal that Black people in America had been cut off from their culture, and that it was his role as an artist to invent a new cultural paradigm.³ Whitten’s titles referred to prominent Black artists and philosophers. A painting like Sorcerer’s Apprentice alludes to Miles Davis’s album Sorcerer, revealing Whitten’s interest in augmenting his process paintings with chance operations inspired by the musician’s improvisational explorations. “There must be a visual equivalent to jazz… an actual object expressing the same pathos. I want my art to show this.”⁴ Jazz is a defining part of Black culture in America. Most especially in the 1960s and 1970s, it was opposed to American pop music in that it valued collaboration, history, and community over monetary success and crass individuality. Likewise, Whitten’s work sought to challenge dominant notions of painting brought about by the Western interpretation of art history.

        Whitten was an early adopter of acrylic paint, a relatively new medium at the time. It became the foundation of his painting practice. Siberian Salt Grinder exemplifies Whitten’s 1970s style. It was created by pushing acrylic paint across a floor-mounted canvas with a unique invention, The Developer, a large plastic squeegee mounted on a massive wooden t-joint. The large size of The Developer allowed Whitten to smear a swath of paint in a single stroke. He would continue to invent attachments and iterations of The Developer including combs, rakes, and such to provide new textures in his paintings. To complicate the image even further, Whitten would place pieces of wire under the canvas to create impressions of lines and forms like fossils amongst sedimentary layers of paint. Whitten likened this process to photography in that it captured a moment in time instantaneously.⁵ This technique would evolve as he would take fragments of paint and place them onto still drying layers, allowing him to create more complex and dense compositions. The “painting-as-collage” works compress disparate instances of time—captured with The Developer into a single plane.⁶ His studio was like a laboratory of innovation, from the materials used to the tools he invented to the ideas he documented across his life in his journals. Breaking new ground is what excited him.

        Whitten’s aesthetic experiments extended past just painting to his forays into printing after receiving a grant from Xerox. Liquid Space I was created by soaking the paper in water before applying the Xerox’s toner ink to the surface. The ripples generated by the paper drying created the form of the composition.

        Seeing Whitten’s work as an oeuvre, it becomes clear how organic and self-generating his painting practice was. Despite the constant fluctuation of his painting style, Whitten’s work displays a persistent ingenuity. His final mosaic works are the culmination of all of his previous experimentation in unorthodox materials and procedural image making. Each piece of these domineering paintings are small fragments of acrylic paint, cut into blocks and composed into sculptural paintings which suggest cityscapes, nebulas, or circuits. Additionally, Whitten would pour acrylic paint over manhole covers and corrugated steel and pull the dried paint up to create relief molds. These reliefs would be collaged onto the surface of the canvas alongside the small mosaic pieces, embedding his surrounding environment into his works.

        This retrospective proves how important Whitten has been to the development of Black art in America. Like other Black abstract painters, such as Sam Gilliam and Norman Lewis, he defied the stereotypes placed on him and believed whole-heartedly that his art could change society by changing the perception of the audience. His work endures because of his innovative methods and the underutilized materials that defined his aesthetic development from the 1960s to his death in 2018. His constant experimentation is overwhelmingly inspiring and hopefully he will be considered amongst other masters of abstraction like Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and Willem DeKooning.

John Thomure is a performance artist and writer currently based in Chicago. His performance and writing practices fixate on local art history, ecology, and exploring underappreciated artists and their archives.

Notes

1. Whitten, Jack, interview by Kenneth Goldsmith, Jack Whitten by Kenneth Goldsmith, BOMB Magazine, 1994, pages?

2. Sortor, Emily. Allegories: The Memorial Paintings of Jack Whitten, WalkerArt.org, 2015, https://walkerart.org/magazine/jack-whittens-memorial-paintings-2/

3. Whitten, Jack, interview by Kenneth Goldsmith.

4. Whitten, Jack. Notes from the Woodshed. Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2018.

5. Whitten, Jack, interview by Kenneth Goldsmith.

6. Sledge, David. Jack Whitten, MOMA.org, 2025, https://www.moma.org/artists/6351-jack-whitten