|
Jack Whitten
Jack Whitten (December 5, 1939 – January 20, 2018)[1] was an American painter and sculptor. In 2016, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts.[2][3] LifeWhitten was born in 1939 in Bessemer, Alabama.[4][5] Planning a career as an army doctor, Whitten entered pre-medical studies at Tuskegee Institute from 1957 to 1959.[4][6] He also traveled to nearby Montgomery, Alabama to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak during the Montgomery bus boycott and was deeply moved by his vision for a changed America.[1] In 1960, Whitten went to Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to begin studying art[6] and became involved in Civil Rights demonstrations there. He participated in a march from downtown Baton Rouge to the state capitol. His artistic ability led him to be in charge of producing the signs and slogans to be used at that demonstration.[7] Whitten believed strongly in Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent approach. However, witnessing the violent reactions from the segregationists made him realize that if he remained in the South, he would turn violent himself.[8] Angered by the violent resistance to change he experienced, he moved to New York City in 1960. He enrolled at Cooper Union in the fall of 1960,[7] graduating with a bachelor's degree in fine art in 1964.[4][6] Afterwards, he remained in New York as a working artist, heavily influenced by the abstract expressionists then dominating the art community, especially Willem de Kooning[9] and Romare Bearden.[7] ArtShortly after graduating from Cooper Union, Whitten had the opportunity to meet other Black artists, including Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis, while he remained in New York to start his art career.[10][11] Whitten's art style was abstract, and he referred to his work as having "truth" and "soul".[7] Much of Whitten's artwork was inspired by his experiences during the Civil Rights Movement. Whitten concluded that slavery obstructed the culture of people of color, and believed that it was his destiny to restore the culture through his pieces.[12] Whitten's earliest paintings date back to the 1960s. A large portion of Whitten's artwork had a feathery, soft effect, which Whitten achieved by placing a nylon mesh fabric over his wet acrylic paintings. Whitten also used a T-shaped tool, which he called the "developer". Whitten would move the tool across the surface of his art in one single motion. This technique was used to represent one point being related to another.[10]  One of Whitten's most famous bodies of work is his Black Monolith Series. Most of the work in this series was a homage or tribute to black activists, politicians, and artists.[10] The two best-known works from this series includes Whitten's Black Monolith III For Barbara Jordan, 1998[13] and Black Monolith II, Homage to Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man, 1994.[14] Whitten's work was featured in the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972. The Whitney mounted a solo exhibition of his paintings in 1974. He has also had individual shows at numerous museums, galleries, and universities, including a 10-year retrospective in 1983 at the Studio Museum in Harlem and an exhibition of memorial paintings in 2008 at the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia.[15] Whitten spent long portions of the summer in Crete, where he had a studio and made sculptures.[9] Throughout his career, Whitten concerned himself with the techniques and materials of painting and the relationship of artworks to their inspirations. At times he pursued quickly-applied gestural techniques akin to photography or printmaking, while at others his deliberate and constructive hand is evident. The New York Times labeled him the father of a "new abstraction."  When the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center occurred, Whitten was at his studio on Lispenard Street in Tribeca.[16] In the following years, he constructed a monumental painting with ashes embedded in it as a memorial of the day.[17] President Barack Obama awarded Whitten the 2015 National Medal of Arts Award.[18] ExhibitionsIn 2013, curator Katy Siegel organized the exhibition Light Years: Jack Whitten, 1971-73 at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.[19] The exhibition featured many works created by Whitten between 1971 and 1973 which had never been exhibited before.[20] In 2014, a retrospective exhibition was organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.[21] The exhibition traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2015[22] and to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from September 13, 2015, to January 24, 2016 [7][23] As part of his Walker engagement, Whitten wrote an Artist Op-Ed on racism and "the role of art in times of unspeakable violence."[24] On February 3, 2018 Crystal Bridges featured two of Whitten's pieces from the 1970s, one of which was Homage to Malcolm, 1970.[25] In 2018, the retrospective exhibition Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture 1963–2016 was organized around the time of his passing and opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art from April 22, 2018, to July 29, 2018.[9] The exhibition traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from September 6 to December 2, 2018, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from March 3 to May 27, 2019. In 2019, Jack Whitten: Jack's Jacks was mounted at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart Berlin,[26] Whitten's first solo exhibition in a European institution. In 2025, the Museum of Modern Art presented Jack Whitten: The Messenger, opening from March 23 to August 2. This was the first monographic exhibit to showcase various media Whitten worked in, as opposed to only his painting or his sculpture. [27] Art marketWhitten was represented by Hauser & Wirth (2016–2018), Alexander Gray Associates (2007–2016), and Zeno X Gallery.[28] Personal lifeWhitten died on January 20, 2018, at age 78.[7] Whitten and his wife Mary resided in Queens, New York. References
Further reading
External links
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
