In 1959, Jack Whitten left his premed studies at Tuskegee to study art at Southern University in Baton Rouge. He quickly became involved with the Civil Rights Movement, organizing bus boycotts, sit-ins and a university shutdown. He had met Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1957 and followed in his non-violent stance, but after witnessing the brutality many of their demonstrations were met with, Whitten questioned his resolve, fearing he himself might succumb to violence.

“I was born in American apartheid. So I’ve always had a sense of purpose. Right from the beginning.”

Whitten, Five Decades of Painting Exhibition (2015)

In 1960, he boarded a bus to New York City and took the entrance exam at Cooper Union, a new science and art college that offered full-tuition scholarships. It was free and open to anyone who passed, regardless of race, gender, religion or wealth. It was the first time Whitten entered an integrated environment.

Inspirations and Mediums
American History

But it was no escape. The Vietnam War was raging. Black soldiers were dying for a country where they were never treated as equals. Had Whitten stayed at Tuskegee, he would have been among them. The racial implications filled him with guilt and anxiety. Then, in 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama, his hometown, was bombed, killing four young girls. Again, he was confronted with the dire reality of Black Americans.

“It was difficult for me to continue my studies at Cooper Union and to convince myself of the value of art.  It became harder to control my emotions; even hate had entered my vocabulary. I was ready to acquire guns and explosives, go back to Alabama and encourage rebellion at any cost necessary.”

His art dealer, Allan Stone, reminded him that an artist’s job was in the studio. His friend, sculptor George Segal, told him, “I am an artist, you are an artist. Tonight, I am going to make another sculpture, and I advise you to do the same.” Whitten immersed himself in jazz music and philosophy and returned to his studio.

Whitten, Birmingham (1964)

Whitten, Head IV Lynching (1964)

Whitten, Psychic Eclipse (1964)

African Sculptures

In 1969, two days before he set sail for Greece, Whitten had a dream commanding him to find a tree and carve it into a totem. At the port in Crete, the tourist office advised him to go south. In the coastal fishing village Aghia Galani, he received permission to carve a tree – a fisherman and sea creatures reaching up to the sky.

Whitten would return to Crete every summer. Stone had once shown him a collection of African artifacts. Witten knew African masks had partly inspired Picasso’s Cubism, and his sculptures followed suit. Carved from different types of wood and pieced with countless other materials, they are totems and talismans, memorials and icons holding cultural and spiritual meaning for him.

Whitten, Homage to Malcolm (1965)

Carved out of African elm just months after the assassination of Malcom X, this weapon-like sculpture takes after Central African nkisi nkondi figures - spiritual vessels the Kongo people believe contain powerful and protective forces.

His first sculptures were figurative or semi-abstractions. Subsequent pieces show geometric rendering and abstract planes, and some show no relationship to figuration. Whitten continued experimenting with materials, incorporating marble and sharp blades while also taking inspiration from mythology and architecture. The techniques of carving, cutting and merging can be seen in his paintings, especially in his later collages. He made sculptures throughout his life, although most remained in Crete until after his death.

Whitten, Bush Woman (1975)

Whitten, Tomb of Socrates (2009)

Whitten, Apollonian Sword (2014)

Abstraction

Abstract Expressionism defined 1960s New York art. To Whitten, abstraction gave him the widest path to freedom of expression. In the 1970s, he turned his studio into a sort of laboratory, moving from easel painting and turning his floor into a massive drawing board. He built another floor made of plywood, linoleum and felt before overlaying it with canvas like an easel.

“Abstraction as we know it can be directed towards the specifics of a subject – a person, a thing, an experience. My goal is to use painting to build abstraction as a symbol, to restore the original importance of man as a symbol-making animal.”

This arrangement allowed him to work and walk around the canvas and view his composition from above, with a bird’s eye high up on a stepladder. He customized tools to allow him to spread a layer of paint in one gesture. The T-shaped “developers” – as he called them, referring to the photographic process – were attached with different edges, such as a squeegee or serrated blade for varying textures. The tools mark the surfaces of his paintings in subtle patterns. These self-made objects became lifelong methods and attributed to the uniqueness of his work.

Whitten, Slab Paintings

He was as meticulous with the paint, carefully planning combinations for the perfect pigmentation and viscosity. He experimented with cheaper gels, then added powdered silica to the acrylic to prevent gloss. At times, he adjusted the layer of canvas by placing shallow items, such as string or wire, which “aggravated” or “disrupted” the surface. With fluid, dance-like movements came his signature slab paintings.

Greek Alphabet Series

Between 1975 and 1978, Whitten embarked on an experimental process using the Greek Alphabet as a means of classification. Titles were not symbolic but categorical. For each letter, he used a specific canvas size for a single compositional idea, reworking and exhausting the possibilities so that each letter group contains several works. Then, he would move on to the following letter and a different set of parameters. The paintings became more complex as new letters unfolded.

Whitten, Eta IV (1976)

Whitten, Mee I (1977)

Whitten, Khee I (1978)

Each canvas was painted with a single pull of a serrated tool. The variations come from a range of disruptors – metal wires and geometric elements inspired by Mandelbrot’s fractal theory. The paintings are predominantly black and white, creating gray fields and fractured surfaces that are austere yet haunting. While he worked in seemingly repetitious formal grids, the effect of his single-gesture paintings is organic. Once an aspiring jazz saxophonist, Whitten referred to them as “sheets of light,” comparing them to John Coltrane’s “sheets of sounds.”

“Jazz is a philosophy – it starts with the notion of the expansion of freedom. Coming from the South, you believe freedom is possible.”

Memorial Paintings

From early on, Whitten used his paintings as commemorations. Beginning in 1968, after the death of Martin Luther King, his memorial paintings marked people and events that affected and influenced him, including 9/11 and the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, which killed 20 students and six teachers in 2012. Every painting is charged with emotions of the specific moment.

“I have always accepted memory as being one of the most powerful elements of human consciousness. Through memory, we construct our past, we honor the dead.”

Whitten, MLK’s Garden (1968)

Whitten, Che! (1969)

Whitten, Brilliant Corners for Thelonious Monk (1998)

Through these paintings, Whitten found a way to contend with the turmoil both outside and inside of him. While many of his subjects dealt with racial and political themes, his move to abstraction allowed him to articulate these issues in non-lingual yet powerful ways.

The paintings were also a way to pay homage to artists who came before him, including Beauford Delaney and Norman Lewis, and continue their work in art history. Whitten characterized his memorial paintings as “gifts to the people who inspired them,” as evident in their dedicated titles.

Whitten, Norman Lewis Triptych I (1985)

Lewis' work also dealt with political and racial issues. Here, Whitten's use of red, white, blue and greens evoke the U.S. and Pan-African flags. The orientation is symbolic of time and history.

“This is my idea of history: traveling in a straight line like my horizontals – I catch a piece of it, but it’s going on forever.”

Black Monoliths

In 1986, Whitten began his Black Monolith series, paintings honoring influential Black Americans, from athletes and musicians to writers and scientists. Many of them Whitten knew, including Jacob Lawrence and Ralph Ellison, and others he praised from afar, such as Barbara Jordan, a Texas jurist he admired for her intelligence and moral conviction.

Whitten, Black Monolith II For Ralph Ellison (1994)

Whitten, Black Monolith VIII for Maya Angelou (2015)

Whitten, Black Monolith X, Birth of Muhammad Ali (2016)

He went back to working upright, placing his canvas directly on the wall. The paintings are abstracted and centralized, with only hints of figuration or sometimes none at all. These were early examples of his collaged paintings. He poured acrylic on polyethylene plastic to create sheets of dried paint, then broke them into tiny pieces. Again, every element is a product of his own hand and mind. His use of mosaics as an aggregation to form a whole feels symbolic, like the many small moments that make up a life. They are, in a way, the many fragments of his social consciousness and, ultimately, the art that is the story of his life.

“I was doing the best I could to contain the kind of imagery I was seeing. It wasn’t an intellectual situation, but rather, it was an emotional necessity. They’re my autobiographical paintings. I was going through a serious crisis in my life. But then everybody was. The whole race issue forced me to pick myself apart subconsciously until I met people like LeRoi Jones, Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, who had found solutions for their creative lives.”