Jack Whitten
Jack Whitten (born 1939 in Bessemer; died January 20, 2018 in New York, New York) was a painter known for his abstract works that paid homage to important figures and concepts, often related to African arts or African-American history.
Whitten was the son of a seamstress who was twice widowed. His mother's first husband, James Cross, was a signpainter and a founder of the Dixie Hummingbirds. His own father, a coal-miner, died while Whitten was a child.
Planning a career as an army doctor, Whitten 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. He also traveled to Montgomery to hear Martin Luther King, Jr speak during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and was deeply moved by his vision for a changed America.
Whitten went to Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to begin studying art and became involved in Civil Rights demonstrations there. Angered by the violent resistance to change he experienced there, and his own sense of defeat, he moved to New York in 1960. He enrolled immediately at the at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, graduating with a bachelor's degree in fine art in 1964. Afterwards he remained in New York as a working artist, heavily influenced by the abstract expressionists then dominating the art community.
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 private 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.
Throughout his career, Whitten concerned himself with the techniques and materials of painting and the relationship of artworks to their inspirations. Since the 1970s he used acrylic media in his work. At times he pursued quickly-applied gestural techniques akin to photography or printmaking. At other times the deliberative and constructive hand was 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 watching the first plane hit. He spent two years constructing a monumental elegiac and emotion-filled panel, with ashes embedded into it, as a memorial of the day.
The Birmingham Museum of Art acquired Whitten's 1974 work "Black Table Setting (Homage to Duke Ellington)" in 2008.
Whitten and his wife, Mary resided in Queens, New York. He also owned a vacation home in Crete. Whitten died at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in January 2018 of complications from chronic leukemia.
References
- Goldsmith, Kenneth (Summer 1994) "Jack Whitten" Bomb Magazine.
- Storr, Robert (Septmeber 2007) "Jack Whitten with Robert Storr" Brooklyn Rail
- Ostrove, Saul (April 2008) "Process, Image and Elegy" Art in America.
- Fox, Catherine (April 26, 2008) "Close to history: Alabama-born artist who boarded a bus to New York in 1960 makes a triumphant return to the South." Atlanta Journal-Constitution
- Moyer, Carrie (October 5, 2009) "Jack Whitten" Brooklyn Rail
- Smee, Sebastian (January 22, 2018) "Jack Whitten: once neglected artist lately the toast of the art world." The Washington Post
- Genzlinger, Neil (January 23, 2018) "Jack Whitten, Artist of Wide-Ranging Curiosity, Dies at 78." The New York Times