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 first full retrospective of Whitten's dazzling and trenchant abstraction from the 1960s–2010s, which transformed the relationship between art, race and society
Jack Whitten offered the world a new way to see. Over nearly six decades, he dared to invent new forms of abstraction, constantly transforming both perception and our understanding of art in society. This gorgeously illustrated volume, with pathbreaking new perspectives and revelatory technical analyses of his innovative materials and processes, explores Whitten's wide-ranging and game-changing practice. Raised in the segregated Jim Crow South in the 1940s, Whitten undertook an extraordinary journey in becoming an artist, convinced that by changing form, he could help change the world. Despite pressure from peers to create figurative art, he was a key proponent of creating abstract art that responded to social turmoil; to his own identity as a Black artist; and to sea changes in technology. He created new ways of painting through a series of artistic inventions and strategies. He defied traditional boundaries between abstraction and representation, pictures and things, culture and technology, individual identity and global history. Published to accompany the first comprehensive retrospective of Whitten's art, this sumptuous catalog presents the full range of his career across painting, sculpture and works on paper, produced in New York and Greece, with texts by leading art historians and artists, and new technical analyses by conservators. Previously unpublished writings by the artist and an expansive chronology of Whitten's life, featuring newly discovered photographs and archival materials, bring into focus an artist who was as committed to human perception as to human rights, becoming one of the most important artists of our time. Jack Whitten (1939–2018) was born in Bessemer, Alabama, and began his studies in medicine at the Tuskegee Institute. After moving to New York in 1960 to attend the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, he became a leading artist in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, and of a generation of Black artists committed to abstraction. Whitten lived in New York until his death.
The late Jack Whitten refused categorization in favor of forging his own way through the 1960s New York art scene. The painter used distinctive techniques, making marks with materials such as Afro combs, saws, and squeegees. These and more examples of his enduring legacy will be on view in his first full retrospective, plus several pieces on public display for the first time.
Robb Report
Julie Belcove
The show’s more than 175 works will span nearly six decades of [Jack Whitten's] practice, which explored the Civil Rights Movement, science, and technology via an impressive range of disciplines including painting, sculpture, collage, photography, printmaking, and music. A tenor saxophonist, he brought an improvisational approach to his work.
T Magazine
M.H. Miller
[Jack Whitten's] work influenced generations of artists — from Andy Warhol to Glenn Ligon — but looked like nothing else before or since.
ArtNews
Alex Greenberger
For Whitten, one of the great painters of the past half century, everything was light—people, places, paintings, all of it. He was less interested in depicting light than in embodying it in paint, no small task.
The Washington Post
Sebastian Smee
What makes Whitten remarkable is more than just his embrace of ambiguity or his technical experimentation. It’s his ability to use abstraction to create palimpsests of poetic meaning, inspired by jazz and hyper-attuned to the implications of modern communication.
The Financial Times
Ariella Budick
Persistently original, restlessly evolving, and uncharmed by fashion.
The New York Times
Holland Cotter
Whitten spoke, with wishful optimism, of wanting to be an artist-citizen of the world, a world in which ‘there is no race, no color, no gender, no territorial hangups, no religion, no politics. There is only life.’ Life is what this great show of his fantastically inventive art is filled with.
The Wall Street Journal
James Panero
The American artist moved from the segregated South to the New York art world and beyond as he forged unique processes of painting and sculpting, the textured, totemic results of which are now on view in a staggering retrospective.
Frieze
Zoe Hopkins
The pieces on view in ‘The Messenger’ – Whitten’s retrospective at MoMA – exceed painting: they reach past the medium, live beyond its edges.
Puck
Marion Maneker
To walk through the MoMA show and marvel at Whitten’s polymath abilities, his deep political and social engagement, and his restless imagination is to be reminded all over again of the loss to ourselves and our culture that we did not know and appreciate a talent like Whitten’s better when he was alive.
Cultured
John Vincler
A remarkable aspect of Kim's oeuvre is how ASL, written English, musical notation, and gestural mark-making are fused into a coherent, unified language
Elle Decor
Camille Okhio
Jack Whitten’s paintings are like voids you fall into before finding you don’t want to leave.
Village Voice
R.C. Baker
Endlessly inventive, [Jack Whitten] mastered complex techniques to animate his visceral imagery.
The New York Times
Julian Lucas
[A] breathtaking, deeply researched glimpse of a career that unfolded in one long eureka.
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Sunday, June 22, at 4 PM, Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore presents a conversation celebrating the exhibition and catalog Jack Whitten: The Messenger. Acclaimed artist Dawoud Bey, book designer Joseph Logan, and Michelle Kuo, MoMA’s Chief Curator at Large and Publisher, will discuss Whitten’s unceasingly innovative forms of abstraction, and illuminate Whitten’s own writings, histories and visions of the future.
Pink Psyche Queen (1973) is reproduced from Jack Whitten: The Messenger, published to accompany MoMA’s historic first full museum retrospective of the artist, on view through August 2, 2025. Featuring a detailed chronology illustrated with dozens of previously unpublished archival photographs and items of ephemera, authoritative essays by a host of Whitten scholars and contemporary artists, a selection of Whitten’s notoriously inspired studio logs addressing time, space, race, art, life, color, music, humanity and what lay beyond even these expansive concepts, plus the full range of his artworks—from his earliest abstract oil paintings to his groundbreaking “slab” works to the late tessellated acrylics on canvas, all interspersed with the remarkable carved and assembled sculptural works he made in Greece over many summers beginning in 1969—this is and will be the definitive book on Whitten for many decades to come. “How fast is an image,” the book’s editor and exhibition curator Michelle Kuo asks, “How far can it go? Jack Whitten believed that images could travel farther and faster than almost anything. For him, they were like waves, or codes, or cosmic vibrations, sources of energy from the most ancient of times that were only just reaching us now. But images could also slow or even stop time, or radiate outward, ‘infinite in all directions,’ in a kind of perpetual present.” She concludes, “Whitten’s relentless, lifelong movement from form to form, and his images’ movement—their flow, their vibrations, their travel, their message—were also, finally, a search for a new way to be. In a world of utter turbulence, he did not fight against the current, but plunged into the wave.” continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 12 in. / 304 pgs / 300 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $75.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $110 ISBN: 9781633451704 PUBLISHER: The Museum of Modern Art, New York AVAILABLE: 4/22/2025 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 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 first full retrospective of Whitten's dazzling and trenchant abstraction from the 1960s–2010s, which transformed the relationship between art, race and society
Jack Whitten offered the world a new way to see. Over nearly six decades, he dared to invent new forms of abstraction, constantly transforming both perception and our understanding of art in society. This gorgeously illustrated volume, with pathbreaking new perspectives and revelatory technical analyses of his innovative materials and processes, explores Whitten's wide-ranging and game-changing practice.
Raised in the segregated Jim Crow South in the 1940s, Whitten undertook an extraordinary journey in becoming an artist, convinced that by changing form, he could help change the world. Despite pressure from peers to create figurative art, he was a key proponent of creating abstract art that responded to social turmoil; to his own identity as a Black artist; and to sea changes in technology. He created new ways of painting through a series of artistic inventions and strategies. He defied traditional boundaries between abstraction and representation, pictures and things, culture and technology, individual identity and global history.
Published to accompany the first comprehensive retrospective of Whitten's art, this sumptuous catalog presents the full range of his career across painting, sculpture and works on paper, produced in New York and Greece, with texts by leading art historians and artists, and new technical analyses by conservators. Previously unpublished writings by the artist and an expansive chronology of Whitten's life, featuring newly discovered photographs and archival materials, bring into focus an artist who was as committed to human perception as to human rights, becoming one of the most important artists of our time.
Jack Whitten (1939–2018) was born in Bessemer, Alabama, and began his studies in medicine at the Tuskegee Institute. After moving to New York in 1960 to attend the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, he became a leading artist in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, and of a generation of Black artists committed to abstraction. Whitten lived in New York until his death.
