Jack Whitten

Jack Whitten (1939-2018) was one of the most inventive American painters of his generation, whose sustained experimentation with paint materials and application transformed the possibilities of postwar American abstraction. Born in Bessemer, Alabama, the son of a seamstress and a coal worker, Whitten initially planned a career as an army doctor. He entered pre-medical studies at Tuskegee Institute, where he took some pilot training and became inspired by George Washington Carver's legacy as a scientist, inventor, and artist. Whitten transferred to Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to study art, and there he became involved in Civil Rights demonstrations. He also traveled to nearby Montgomery, Alabama, to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. speak during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and he was deeply moved by King's vision for a changed America. Angered by the violent resistance to change he witnessed in the South, Whitten moved to New York City in 1960.

Whitten enrolled immediately at Cooper Union, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1964. He remained in New York as a working artist, strongly influenced by the Abstract Expressionists then dominating the art community. His first New York show came in 1965 in an exhibition titled Four Voices, One Theme, with his first solo show following in 1969, both at the Allan Stone Gallery.

Throughout his career, Whitten's experimentation with the materiality and techniques of painting informed many of his most important choices. Employing an array of acrylic polymers, he explored the variances in viscosity, clarity, brilliance, and elasticity of paint. To create color he used an inventive and unusually broad range of materials, including iron oxide, dry pigments, crushed Mylar, ash, bone, and even blood. The materials, color use, and paint application all manifest emotionally complex meditations on his experiences during the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the political turmoil of the 1960s.

Whitten was the subject of numerous major exhibitions, including Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting, a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego in 2014 and 2015; Jack Whitten: Erasures at SCAD Savannah College of Art and Design in 2012; an exhibition of memorial paintings at the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center in Georgia in 2008; a solo show at MoMA PS1 in 2007; a ten-year retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1983; and a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974. His powerful painting 9-11-01 of 2006 was included in the Venice Biennale in 2013. Whitten was awarded a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2016 and was inducted into the National Academy Museum and School in October of that year. He also received an honorary doctorate from Brandeis University in May 2016. Whitten's work is held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum, the Tate in London, and other major international collections. The artist died in New York in 2018.