4/17/2025
"I make a painting not paint a painting," Jack Whitten wrote, and the making is brought forth throughout the retrospective of his work that's currently on display at MoMA. His labor, tools, materials, and techniques. His ways of seeing, hearing, sensing, thinking, and being from whence the work came. I hadn't been familiar with Whitten's work, but by the time I had made my way through his earliest work, I was obsessed.
The show's captions draw attention to the relationship between extraction and production in Whitten's approach to his work, and from there his fixation on mechanical reproduction — a process of iterative (re)generation. Hailing from the coal town of Bessemer, Alabama, Whitten's father was a coal miner and his mother a teacher. He pays direct tribute to them as workers in two portraits, and he explores his geographic heritage directly in his use of coal mixed with paint and other substances. But in addition to those things, his thickly layered canvases, his mosaic-like rearrangements, and his application of textures with tools such as Afro combs and pencils can be understood as extractive production — art as the creation of reserves from which to mine and manufacture.
Rather than depicting a face or likeness, Whitten’s Black Monoliths are abstract—the paint infused with materials such as coal dust, pearlescent powder, and octopus ink to evoke or even embody the works’ subjects. The kaleidoscopic mosaics and reliefs suggest individual elements or fragments coming together: constellations of stars, glittering gems, waves of sound, or masses of earth.
—Wall text, MoMA retrospective
In Whitten's work, the innate violence of extraction can be repaired. What is removed does not destroy a whole but creates the conditions for something. A Black artist's work can be a matter of restoring being and integrity to Blackness, making it alive, scoring it so it shimmers with presence in the light.