Right now, the largest survey ever mounted of the great abstract artist Jack Whitten is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s been greeted with surprise and astonishment, and yet it’s worth asking why anyone should be surprised. After all, Whitten, who passed in 2018, had a sixty-year career at the center of twentieth-century art.
First, who was Jack Whitten? He was born in Bessemer, Alabama in 1939, the son of a coal miner and a seamstress. A remarkable student, he earned a scholarship to Tuskegee Institute, where a pre-med course of study in chemistry, biology and math stoked a lifelong fascination with science and its applications.
After two years, an artistic and political awakening led him to abandon his studies at Tuskegee and enter the art program at Southern University in Baton Rouge. He had met Martin Luther King and, in Baton Rouge, became active in civil rights demonstrations, some of which turned violent. Shocked and embittered by his experience in the South, he found his way to New York in 1960 to attend art school at Cooper Union.
As the only Black student in his class, he was befriended by a faculty member, also Black, who introduced him to Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence. Before long, Whitten was rubbing elbows at the Cedar Tavern with other mid-century greats like Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman and Philip Guston. As a sometime sax player, Whitten also found connection in the jazz world, taking important advice from John Coltrane and inspiration from Art Blakey’s rhythms.
It was a long way from the world of his childhood, where the nearest art museum in Birmingham wouldn’t admit African American visitors. But somehow Whitten never lacked confidence. You feel this in every room of the exhibition, in the number (175) and variety of works in the show, and in their sheer size (the largest is ten feet by twenty). Whitten’s works affect the body as much as the mind or eye. As artist Julie Mehretu writes in the exhibition catalogue, “Abstraction can be an experience that you can feel, that you are in the presence of. Whitten knew the somatic sense of how a painting can conjure experience, rather than being something that can be read or deciphered.”
Whitten’s own accounts of his creative process, blending philosophy, craft and science, are absolutely wonderful—his enthusiasm comes through full strength. His words are available in archival audio throughout the exhibition, and on MoMA’s website, as well as in a catalogue chapter called “Writings, Letters, Lectures, Lesson Plans.” If you’re looking for more extended conversations, Whitten’s conversations with Tyler Green for the Modern Art Notes podcast are also well worth a listen.
Installation view of “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” 2025, at MoMA/Photo: Jonathan Dorado
But if you did nothing more than see this show and read this catalogue, you’d have a broad and deep view of Whitten and his work. MoMA curator Michelle Kuo has been writing about Whitten for more than a decade and knew him personally in his final years. The show she and her colleagues have assembled takes you through every phase of Whitten’s career, from the early, quasi-representative works to his first abstractions and onto his attempts to escape the influences of masters like Pollock and de Kooning. His triumphant “slab” paintings—large-scale works created on a horizontal platform and painted with a gigantic squeegee-like device he called “the developer”—still look as contemporary as anything you’ll find in a gallery today. And then he transcends that innovation with a series of new approaches and techniques, culminating in his “tesserae” works that appear to be composed of small glass or ceramic tiles, but are in fact acrylic paint from a process he developed himself.
The catalogue provides a detailed chronology of Whitten’s life and work, and Kuo provides the most thorough biographical essay on Whitten I’ve seen. In later chapters, ten contemporary figures—artists, curators and scholars—each write about one of Whitten’s works. Among these, I found Mehretu’s reflections on abstract art and George E. Lewis’ connections between Whitten and improvisational jazz to be the most interesting. But all are serious, detailed looks at Whitten’s sources, materials, creative process and meaning-making, consistent with a catalogue that aspires to, and achieves, its dual purpose as a useful companion to the exhibition and a profound work of scholarship.
So why isn’t Whitten more widely known? More than two-thirds of the works in the show are in private hands or owned by the estate. It’s a tribute to Kuo and team that they were able to bring all these works together, but it’s also an indication of how hard it is to see Whitten’s works at all, let alone in sufficient number to appreciate them. It’s also true that—as art historian Mark Godfrey’s essay points out—there’s a long history of privileging Black representational art over Black abstract work, an attitude that’s changed only recently. Lastly, Whitten followed his own path, whether it served his career and reputation or not. He became fascinated with Greece and spent summers there for many years, away from the New York art world and its concerns. After witnessing the collapse of the World Trade Center from the street outside his studio in lower Manhattan, Whitten showed no new works for five years while creating his masterpiece dedicated to the event, one of the highlights of the MoMA show.
It’s an unforgettable exhibition, and one we’re not likely to see again. Go see it if you can.
“Jack Whitten: The Messenger” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, through August 2. Catalog “Jack Whitten: The Messenger” is edited with text by Michelle Kuo. Text by Julie Mehretu, Glenn Ligon, Anna Deavere Smith, George Lewis, Sampada Aranke, Mark Godfrey, Richard Shiff, Annie Wilker, Michael Duffy, Dana Liljegren, David Sledge, Helena Klevorn, Kiko Aebi, Eana Kim, JaBrea Patterson-West. The Museum of Modern Art, 304 pages.
