Jack Whitten for “Jack Whitten: The Messenger” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
March 23–August 2, 2025
Curators: Michelle Kuo, with Helena Klevorn, Dana Liljegren, and David Sledge
Across his six-decade career, Jack Whitten repeatedly found daring, innovative, and new ways of wielding paint, only rarely using the traditional oil-on-canvas method that has long dominated his chosen medium. During the late 1960s, he began using acrylic, a type of paint that dries faster than oil and was generally eschewed by artists for that reason at the time. Shortly afterward, he started dragging his paint across his canvases rather than wielding a brush. And in his later years, he made mosaic-like paintings composed from dried acrylic chips and refuse.
All this experimentation should have easily qualified Whitten as one of the defining abstractionists of his era, but until very recently, the canon failed to accept him—even in New York, where Whitten was based for most of his career. Building on a traveling survey that visited the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis between 2015 and 2016, the Museum of Modern Art staged a 175-work mega-retrospective for Whitten this year that filled an entire floor. Curated by Michelle Kuo, it was the first show of its kind since Whitten’s death in 2018.
The vast exhibition, titled “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” succeeded in large part because it conveyed the physicality of Whitten’s painterly technique and the materiality of his art. Many viewers responded to the inclusion of the Developer, the squeegee-like tool that Whitten created in 1970 to pull his paint around. Where many retrospectives are satisfied by merely letting the work speak for itself, this one also shined a light on the tools used to make it.
Kuo’s retrospective attested to the diversity of Whitten’s oeuvre. There were early works from the ’60s contending with his experiences demonstrating during the civil rights movement. There were mid-career works from the ’80s and ’90s paying homage to Black thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison. And there were even lesser-known late-career works such as a monumentally scaled abstraction from 2006 that memorializes the experience of living in New York on 9/11. In refusing to pigeonhole Whitten by ascribing a single aesthetic to him, the exhibition allowed the artist to remain as complex as he was during the lifetime—and paves the way for greater recognition of his many achievements in the centuries to come.
Nominees:
Alvin Ailey
“Edges of Ailey”
Whitney Museum, New York
September 25, 2024–February 9, 2025
Curator: Adrienne Edwards
Ruth Asawa
“Ruth Asawa: Retrospective”
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
April 5–September 2, 2025
Curators: Janet Bishop and Cara Manes, with Marin Sarvé-Tarr, William Hernández Luege, and Dominika Tylcz
Noah Davis
“Noah Davis”
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
June 8–August 31, 2025
Curators: Eleanor Nairne and Wells Fray-Smith; Aram Moshayedi, with Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi and Nyah Ginwright
Madalena Santos Reinbolt
“Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets”
American Folk Art Museum, New YorkFebruary 12–May 25, 2025
Curators: Amanda Carneiro and André Mesquita; Valérie Rousseau, with Dylan Blau Edelstein
