FEW ARTISTS ARE as closely associated with Lower Manhattan as Jack Whitten, the subject of a major retrospective opening this month at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1962, as a student at Cooper Union, he became one of the first artists to settle below Canal Street, at an address on the corner of Lispenard and Church that had once belonged to the abolitionist David Ruggles and been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Frederick Douglass had stayed there for a few days in 1838 after escaping from Maryland in disguise. Whitten occupied the space for 40 years, engaged in an endless exploration of abstract painting that, as he put it near the end of his life, went “beyond the general notions of race, gender, nationalism.” His work influenced generations of artists — from Andy Warhol to Glenn Ligon — but looked like nothing else before or since. He knew everyone who passed through the downtown art scene: Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Norman Lewis, Louise Bourgeois, Kate Millett, Bob Thompson, Ishmael Reed, James Baldwin, John Coltrane, Alma Thomas, Jasper Johns, Amiri Baraka, Jean-Michel Basquiat.
By 2001, though, Whitten was looking for a new place to live and work, somewhere he could make larger paintings. He and his wife, Mary, now 84, who ran a paper-conservation studio at 36 Lispenard, had spent summers in a fishing village on Crete ever since their honeymoon in 1969, and they returned to New York that September reluctantly. It was muggy and hot, but on the 11th the heat broke and the morning was bright and clear. Whitten noticed a fire truck and a film crew outside. Two brothers were making a documentary about a rookie firefighter and were embedded with Ladder Company 1 of the New York Fire Department as they responded to a call about a possible gas leak. When Whitten went down to investigate, there was a loud noise that sounded like a jet engine accelerating, and one of the filmmakers happened to point his camera in the direction of the World Trade Center, 14 blocks south, in time to capture American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the North Tower. In the footage, which would soon be looped on TV, you can hear Whitten shouting “holy [expletive]!” in disbelief.
That was how the artist ended up on a quiet block in Woodside, Queens, in a former carriage house beneath the tracks of the Long Island Rail Road. He worked there until his death at age 78 in 2018, living nearby in Jackson Heights. The first and arguably the most famous work he made in Queens was the 10-by-20-foot “9.11.01,” a yearslong effort. Throughout his life, Whitten had made elegy paintings for figures ranging from Lena Horne to Malcolm X to Basquiat, deploying abstract forms as a kind of allegory for his subjects. A 1992 painting for Miles Davis — a grid of acrylic-and-polyethylene tiles rendered in black, white and gray — resembles an astrological chart. The World Trade Center’s destruction left Whitten questioning how art should respond to traumatic moments in history, much as the Cuban Missile Crisis had decades earlier. He embedded those doubts in “9.11.01,” an anxious mosaic of thousands of plaster molded tiles cast in acrylic paint. Completed in 2006, it broadened the parameters of what a painting could be — not just in terms of its size but also of its blurring of the lines between collage, sculpture, abstraction and figurative representation. At its center is a form inspired by the pyramid on the U.S. dollar bill. Around it, Whitten’s brushstrokes look like dust or smoke, as if the pyramid is collapsing into itself. Some of the pigments included ash from Whitten’s potbellied stove and blood from a butcher’s shop. He was memorializing America but also, it seemed, his own career.
THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Whitten “witnessed these pivotal moments of history,” said Michelle Kuo, the curator of the MoMA show. Mary described Whitten — who claimed that all artists are “participants in an act of history” — as a Zelig-like figure. He was born in Bessemer, Ala., in 1939. His father was a coal miner who died when Whitten was 5, his mother a deeply religious seamstress and activist who helped prepare Black voters for so-called literacy tests designed to prevent them from registering. As a child, Whitten saw burning crosses and Klan hoods, and was shot at while trying to fish in the Cahaba River. Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., he participated in a demonstration against segregation at the state capitol in Baton Rouge, La., in 1960, when he was an art student at Southern University. From their offices, people emptied egg cartons and jars of urine onto the protesters praying below. Whitten would later write that if he didn’t leave the South, “I would be killed or I would end up killing somebody.” Somehow, Kuo said, “he channeled that anger into visionary beauty.”
Whitten saved almost everything, from drawings he made at Cooper Union that were dismissed by his professors to the bones of his daily lunch: a whole fish. He even saved the excess paint from completed works to use in later paintings and sculptures. “He was aware of his self-worth,” Mary said. After he died, she and the couple’s daughter, Mirsini Amidon, 52, the manager of her father’s estate, decided to keep the studio as Whitten had left it. Empty wine bottles sit on a table by the kitchen. On the stove is a stack of books he was reading — travelogues by Patrick Leigh Fermor, essays by John Berger, “Being and Time” by Martin Heidegger. His brushes and smock are still there, as if Whitten had simply gone home for the night. On one wall are a picture of a Jasper Johns “Target” painting and photographs of Whitten receiving the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2016. Besides using it as an office for the estate, the family has no concrete plans for the space; for now, it won’t become a museum or have public hours. It merely stands as evidence of all the time Whitten spent here, as he tried to get the thoughts out of his head and onto the canvas.
Photo assistant: Jordan Macy
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