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for Jack Whitten
Jack Whitten
born Bessemer, AL 1939; died New York, NY 2018
DiedNew York, New York, USA
BornBessemer, Alabama, USA
BiographyJack Whitten was born in Bessemer and briefly studied medicine at the Tuskegee Institute before pursuing art at Southern University in Baton Rouge, then Cooper Union in New York City, where he earned his BFA in 1964. He remained in New York, a significant figure in the overlapping downtown worlds of black culture and experimental painting, becoming known for his experiments with the process and material of paint—whether innovating a “developer” that allowed him to push large amounts of paint in a single motion, or carving sculptural “tesserae” from acrylic paint that he would then apply, as if mosaic, to a painting. In 2015, President Obama awarded Whitten a National Medal of Arts, and in 2018, a retrospective of his previously unknown sculptures was organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Art is the only spiritual form that we can depend on. When politics goes amok, when organized religions become political . . . we can always depend on art to pull us through. We must make sure the arts will survive for the benefit of all . . . ART IS OUR COMPASS TO THE COSMOS.”
Person TypeIndividual