Jack Whitten: The Messenger

Born in Louisiana in 1939, Jack Whitten grew up amid the violence and racism of the segregated South and spent much of his adolescence involved with the Civil Rights movement. When he arrived in New York in 1960 as a 21-year-old student, he mingled with some of the titans of the city’s cultural scene and decided to become an artist. Both his political engagement and his proximity to these artists fed into the style he developed – an innovative mode of abstraction that drew on the influence of his older contemporaries Mark Rothko and Philip Guston as well as of Black painters such as Jacob Lawrence. MoMA’s survey spans the whole of Whitten’s remarkable career, from the 1960s to his death in 2018 and includes his technology-inspired sculptures, the huge works he made in the 1970s by pulling layers of paint across a canvas on the floor, and the rich mosaics he assembled from cut-up pieces of hardened acrylic paint (23 March–2 August).

Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary
Find out more from MoMA’s website