CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/23/2025

McNally Jackson Seaport presents Michelle Kuo, Torkwase Dyson, Jacqueline Humphries and T Lax on 'Jack Whitten: The Messenger'

Wednesday, July 23, at 6:30 PM, McNally Jackson Seaport presents a celebration of the revelatory exhibition and book Jack Whitten: The Messenger at The Museum of Modern Art with Michelle Kuo, Torkwase Dyson, Jacqueline Humphries and T Lax.

Jack Whitten (1939–2018) created visionary beauty from righteous anger. Born in Bessemer, Alabama, amid the violence of the segregated South, he joined the Civil Rights movement, then made his way to New York in 1960. Over the next six decades, he dared to invent novel techniques for making art, with tools and materials ranging from acrylic paint to Afro-combs to electrostatic printing. In celebration of his retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, and the accompanying publication Jack Whitten: The Messenger, join Michelle Kuo, Chief Curator at Large and Publisher, in conversation with T Lax, Curator of Media and Performance, MoMA, and acclaimed artists Torkwase Dyson and Jacqueline Humphries, to discuss Whitten’s unceasingly innovative forms of abstraction, and illuminate his writings, philosophies, and visions of the future.

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.

Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. She frequently creates compositions of three “hypershapes”—a rectangular box, a triangle, and a trapezoid. Each form references a historical person who escaped confinement through a space of that shape: for example, Harriet Jacobs, who spent seven years in a trapezoidal attic crawlspace. As representations of spaces used for escape, migration, and transformation, Dyson’s hypershapes embody a Black experience defined by constant shapeshifting and change. Dyson has been lauded with major outdoor commissions at Desert X, Palm Desert, California (2023); Counterpublic in St. Louis, Missouri (2023); and the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Dyson’s work is held in notable public collections including The Art Institute of Chicago; Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont; Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Long Museum, Shanghai; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others.

Jacqueline Humphries lives and works in New York. Her work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, in 2022, and was the subject of a major survey at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, in 2021. Other institutional solo shows include Dia Art Foundation, The Dan Flavin Art Institute, Bridgehampton, New York (2019); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2015); and Contemporary Art Center New Orleans (2015). Significant group shows include those held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2024); National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2022); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2019); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2019, 2015); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016); Tate Modern (2015); and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, among others. Humphries's work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon; and Museum Brandhorst, Munich, among others.

T Lax is a curator of media and performance at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). With Connie Butler and Kari Rittenbach, they organized the exhibition Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon (2024-25) and also co-organized the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces (2022–23) with Lilia Rocio Taboada in collaboration with Just Above Midtown's founder Linda Goode Bryant. They worked with colleagues across MoMA on a major rehang of its collection in 2019 and co-organized the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done (2018–19) with Ana Janevski and Martha Joseph. Their other collaboratively organized exhibitions include: the Projects series for emerging artists with Lanka Tattersall; Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection (2017), inspired by the cultural theorist Stuart Hall; MoMA PS1’s contemporary art quintennial Greater New York; and commissions with artists including Neil Beloufa, Maria Hassabi, and Steffani Jemison. Previously, they worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem for seven years, where they organized When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South (2014) and participated in the landmark F-show contemporary art series. Lax is currently working on a book about dependency.

'Jack Whitten: The Messenger' with Michelle Kuo, Torkwase Dyson, Jacqueline Humphries and T Lax
McNally Jackson Seaport
Wednesday, July 23 at 6:30 PM
4 Fulton Street, New York City
Tickets