Gestural Disruption #9
1988
Acrylic on Fabriano paper

The Manhattan Repository
1988
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 82”

The Offering
1989
Acrylic on canvas on board
26 1/8 x 26 1/8”

Jack Whitten (b. 1939) was born in Bessemer, Alabama. Whitten credited his can-do DIY aesthetic to his mother, a widowed seamstress, whose resourcefulness and creativity influenced his approach to art and life. Whitten attended Southern University in New Orleans to study art. Inspired by the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King (as well as a brief meeting with the man himself), Whitten joined the civil rights movement. He struggled to uphold Dr. King’s principle of non-violence when he was beaten with sticks during a march to the state capital and decided to leave the South for good, catching a bus to New York City. He enrolled in the Cooper Union to study painting.

Some of the first people he met in New York were well-known Black artists Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis. Whitten reinvented his style in New York, abandoning paintbrushes altogether. To create whole paintings composed of a single gesture, he devised a 12-foot-wide giant squeegee that he used to rake paint across canvasses. Though he lacked gallery representation and much money for paint, he scraped together enough materials to make a series of these large-scale paintings for a solo show at the Whitney Museum of Art.

Looking to reinvent himself again, he decided to go “into the woodshed.” A phrase borrowed from jazz musicians, “woodshedding” means rehearsing alone. Working solo, he stripped down his color palate and by the 1980s, he had started drying out sheets of acrylic to create “tessellae”—fragmented pieces of hardened paint that he affixed to the surface of his canvasses to catch and reflect the light.

Beginning in the early 1980s, and continuing for decades, he made a series of works called “Black Monoliths” as homages to black musicians, writers, artists and public figures who he considered to be in the cultural pantheon and who had contributed significantly to society. In each work, he tried to capture and memorialize the essence of that person.