CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/10/2025

The search for a new way to be in 'Jack Whitten: The Messenger'

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 Featuring a detailed chronology illustrated with dozens of previously unpublished archival photographs and items of ephemera, authoritative essays by a host of Whitten scholars and contemporary artists, a selection of Whitten’s notoriously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.”