Jack Whitten

Noted for his groundbreaking approach to painting as well as his promotion of underserved voices, Jack Whitten was a trailblazing painter and sculptor whose work combines elements of Abstract Expressionism and process art. Born in 1939 in Bessemer, Alabama, and having come of age in the racially segregated South, Whitten was deeply invested in racial justice.

Whitten moved to New York City in the early 1960s and enrolled in Cooper Union after facing extreme malice during a civil rights demonstration in Baton Rouge. Cooper Union proved to be a more inclusive environment that fostered the artist’s creativity. There, he encountered the works of Abstract Expressionists and became particularly influenced by artists like Willem de Kooning and Norman Lewis. However, Whitten quickly developed his own distinctive style, marked by experimentation with materials and techniques.

Although surrounded by a primarily white student body, Whitten sought out Black mentors, particularly Robert Blackburn, an esteemed printmaker who managed Cooper Union’s print room. Blackburn introduced Whitten to the Black arts scene in New York, acquainting him with narrative artists such as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence. While Whitten ultimately leaned towards Abstract Expressionist styles, his oeuvre was profoundly shaped by these artists.

In the 1970s, Whitten began his series which he called Energy Fields, which involved dragging tools, ranging from Afro combs to squeegees to rakes and brooms, across the surface of the canvas to create textured, layered effects — a technique that can be found in his other series such as Greek Alphabet. This approach allowed him to capture both the physicality of painting and the intangible aspects of emotion and memory.

Jack Whitten’s art often explored themes of African American identity, history and politics. His Black Monolith series, created in tribute to African American cultural figures, stands as a powerful testament to his commitment to celebrating Black creativity, culture and influence. These works feature intricate, mosaic-like surfaces that combine paint, acrylic and other materials to form strikingly complex compositions.

Since the 1960s abstraction has dominated Whitten’s artistic practice. It was during the 1970s, however, when Whitten mastered his experiment abstract vocabulary, which benchmarked a turning point in the artist’s career as it prompted crucial institutional recognition of Whitten’s work in New York, first with the Whitney Museum of American Art solo exhibition. Today, the Whitney, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art and more all hold paintings by Whitten in their permanent collections.