CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/13/2018

In 'Jack Whitten: Odyssey,' sculpture moves backward and forward in time and across the globe

"Jack Whitten was a man of many ways," Katy Siegel writes in Jack Whitten: Odyssey, published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. to accompany the exhibition currently on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art, en route to The Met this fall. "He found his way from segregated Alabama to art school in New York. He found a way to think about painting as a medium that beat mainstream formalism on its own grounds. He found different ways into African art through the seemingly conflicting perspectives of older postwar artists, Afrocentric politics, and the advocates of black cosmopolitanism. In the 1980s and following decades, he found a way to make paintings that expand our conception of what art can handle: memorials for loved ones, indexes of place, the stuff of quantum space-time. And perhaps most surprisingly, he found ways to make sculpture that moves backward and forward in time and across the globe. Whitten was a larger artist than the provincial New York art world could imagine (and, sometimes, than it could accept)—better, more expansive and various, than that time and place, that social context, deserved." Here, Whitten carves wood for a sculpture in Kyria Irini's courtyard, Agia Galini, Crete, 1972.