LUCIA ZEZZA | DATE 6/22/2025

Artbook at MoMA PS1 Bookstore presents Dawoud Bey, Michelle Kuo and Joseph Logan on 'Jack Whitten: The Messenger'

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.

Event livestreamed on Instagram at @artbookps1.

Please RSVP for the event and pre-order a signed copy here.

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. Jack Whitten: The Messenger at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (on view through August 2, 2025) is the first comprehensive retrospective of Whitten's dazzling and trenchant abstraction from the 1960s–2010s, which transformed the relationship between art, race and society. Published to accompany the exhibition, 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 Previously unpublished writings by the artist and an expansive chronology of Whitten's life, featuring newly discovered photographs and archival materials, bring into focus an artist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.

Dawoud Bey, groundbreaking artist and MacArthur Fellow, examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. Bey’s work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, including Dawoud Bey: An American Project organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020-2022), and Elegy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2023-2024) and New Orleans Museum of Art (2025-2026); and Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits at the Denver Art Museum (2024-2025). He has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture/VMFA, 2023), which chronicles Bey's history projects and landscape-based work. Bey is the recipient of numerous awards including five honorary doctorates, and in 2024, the artist was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bey lives and works in Chicago and New York. He is currently a Critic at Yale University, where he received his Masters in Fine Arts, and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago.

Michelle Kuo was appointed Chief Curator at Large and Publisher at MoMA in 2024. She leads innovative, interdisciplinary work on temporary and collection exhibitions, digital initiatives, research and scholarship, and acquisitions for the Museum’s collection, and she directs MoMA’s ambitious global publications program. Kuo joined MoMA in 2018 as the Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture. Her exhibitions and collaborations include Jack Whitten: The Messenger (2025), Otobong Nkanga: Cadence (2024–25), New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century (2019), Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape (2020), Amanda Williams: Embodied Sensations (2021), Refik Anadol: Unsupervised (2022), Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023), Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers (2024), and Montien Boonma: House of Hope (2024). Her publications include Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (2024), More than Real: Art in the Digital Age (2018), and numerous writings on Fluxus and the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Jack Whitten, Anicka Yi, and others. Kuo has published and lectured extensively on international modern and contemporary art. She has taught at Yale and Harvard Universities and serves on the advisory boards of the Museum Brandhorst, Munich and the journal October.

Joseph Logan is designer of the volume, Jack Whitten: The Messenger (2025). He has contributed to nearly one hundred art books, including exhibition catalogues and monographs for artists such as Wade Guyton, Ellsworth Kelly, Glenn Ligon, Zoe Leonard, Julie Mehretu, Taryn Simon, and more. Logan enjoys working closely with artists, curators, editors, and writers to create publications whose form and structure are tailored to—and in dialogue with—their content. Logan attended Hunter College where he trained as a painter. His evolution as a book designer has been informed by early positions in commercial and magazine design, and especially by his friendships with artists. Logan is based in New York. His current projects include Christopher Wool: Seestoprun, Alejandro Iñárritu: Amores Perros (MACK, London), Douglas Crimp: Dance, Dance Film, Essays (Dancing Foxes Press, New York), Ed Ruscha, Catalogue Raisonné of the Books, Prints, and Photographic Editions, 1960–2021 (Gagosian Gallery, New York), and Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore
'Jack Whitten: The Messenger' Book Celebration with Dawoud Bey, Michelle Kuo and Joseph Logan
Saturday, June 22, at 4 PM EST
22-25 Jackson Ave (at 46th Ave.)
Long Island City, NY 11101
(718) 433-1088
RSVP and pre-order a signed book here.