The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will present the first comprehensive Jack Whitten retrospective. The exhibition, titled “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” will run from March 23 to August 2, 2025, and span the late American artist’s nearly six-decade career. Organized by Michelle Kuo, MoMA chief curator at large, along with curatorial assistant Helena Klevorn, the retrospective will feature over 175 works. Whitten passed away in 2018 at the age of 78.
Born in 1939 in Bessemer, Alabama, Whitten briefly studied medicine at the Tuskegee Institute before moving to New York in 1960. There, he studied painting at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. His career began amid the civil rights movements of the 1960s, influencing many of his early works. This includes Birmingham 1964 (1964), created in response to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. While briefly associated with Abstract Expressionists, such as Willem de Kooning, Whitten deviated from the movement’s philosophy and techniques.
“He connected painting to photography, sculpture, printmaking, music, and new technologies,” said Kuo. “He created monumental works that confront watershed moments in history, from the Civil Rights movement to the discovery of new galaxies.… He made art matter in a world in turmoil.”
“The Messenger” will feature Whitten’s breakthrough paintings from the 1970s, such as Siberian Salt Grinder (1974), in which he applied heavy slabs of acrylic paint to canvas and altered them with Afro combs and neoprene squeegees. Elsewhere, the exhibition will feature his monochromatic works made with photocopier toner, such as Liquid Space I (1976).
In addition to his paintings, the exhibition will highlight Whitten’s mosaic work from the 1990s. It will also look back at his early experimental sculptures from the mid-60s onwards, which incorporate bone, wood, glass, and circuit boards.
At the time of his death, Whitten was represented by Hauser & Wirth. His work was the subject of several solo exhibitions at Dia Beacon, Alexander Gray Associates, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. In 2018, a major survey of Whitten’s sculpture practice titled “Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture 1963–2016” opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art before traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
