Latest news with #JackWhitten
Wall Street Journal
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
NADA and TEFAF Reviews: Art Fairs That Rise Above
New York The city's spring art fairs are at peak activity at the moment, after the final major event, TEFAF, had its opening last night. Around New York there's much to see—from the tentpole Frieze; to smaller, more boundary-pushing fairs like Independent; to the dozens of gallery openings scheduled to coincide with the influx of culturally conscious visitors who descend upon the city this time each year. And that's not to mention major museum exhibitions that deserve a place on any art lover's itinerary (Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim; Jack Whitten at MoMA; John Singer Sargent at the Met; and Amy Sherald at the Whitney are all worth a visit).
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Jazzed About Abstraction: Jack Whitten's Show Is a Peak MoMA Moment
'I'm a product of American Apartheid,' the artist Jack Whitten wrote, a blunt fact that led him to project, in his art, a very different reality, one of 'infinite diversity in infinite combinations.' It was a vision that propelled and buoyed him through a nearly six-decade career. 'This is why I get up in the morning,' he wrote, 'and go to work!' And how very lucky we are, at a moment when references to diversity and difference are being scrubbed from accounts of our national history, to have a refreshing tidal wave of a Whitten career retrospective sweeping and scintillating through the special exhibition galleries on the Museum of Modern Art's sixth floor. Titled 'Jack Whitten: The Messenger,' the show encompasses some 180 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, from a 1963 art-school collage to a final painting from just before he died in 2018. Over that span Whitten called every studio he worked in a 'laboratory,' and every piece of art he made an 'experiment.' And, indeed, much of what's in the show challenges ready definition. Such is the case with a piece called 'The Messenger (for Art Blakey)' installed just outside the first gallery. From a distance it could be a photograph of a star-drenched night sky, or of clouds of foam on a dark sea. Or it could a painting with white paint glopped and dripped, Abstract Expressionist-style, on a black ground. Get close and you find that, in fact, it's a large rough-textured mosaic pieced together from thousands of pixel-like cubes of dried paint. You consult the title for meaning: Art Blakey, Black drummer extraordinaire, leader in the 1950s of the hardbop group called the Jazz Messengers. Suddenly the glops and drips look sonic, like musical bursts and pings. So what, exactly, do you have here? Astral vistas and Atlantic crossings. Jazz and Jackson Pollock. A painting that's built, not brushed. An art whose messages are historical, mystical, personal, by a radically inventive artist who ranks right at the top of abstraction's pantheon, as will become clear in the exhibition ahead. Whitten was born in Bessemer, Ala., in the Jim Crow South, in 1939. His father was a coal miner, his mother a seamstress, whose first husband, James Monroe Cross, had been an amateur painter of local scenes. Early on, Whitten knew he too wanted to be an artist, though it took a while to make the move. In the late 1950s, he immersed himself in civil rights activism — he met Martin Luther King Jr., in Montgomery — until, feeling battered by the experience of violence, he left the South. He headed to New York City. There he studied at Cooper Union, and became interested in abstract art. He forged friendships with painters of an older generation, Willem de Kooning and Norman Lewis among them. He hung out with younger abstract artists — Melvin Edwards, Al Loving, William T. Williams — who were, like him, looking to make work that was culturally and politically 'Black' without being overtly polemical. The art form that seemed to do that most successfully was jazz. Once an aspiring musician himself, Whitten always claimed it as a crucial influence. And he got his fill of it in the downtown clubs where Blakey, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk — he knew them all — regularly played. (All four can be heard on an ambient soundtrack in MoMA's galleries.) And from the start he was experimenting. A 1967 oil painting called 'NY Battle Ground' — the reference is to civil rights and antiwar protests in the city — is explosively painterly in a classic Ab-Ex way. But already, in 'Birmingham 1964,' he had produced, from aluminum foil, stretched stocking and torn newsprint, a grief-and-fury-filled assemblage-style memorial to the 1964 church bombing that resulted in the deaths of four African American girls. And in the same year he had combined a screen-printing process and acrylic paint to create a ghostly photographic-looking image called 'Head IV Lynching.' Whitten would make acrylic paint, not yet in wide use, his medium of choice. And, in an effort to cut loose from conventional painting styles that privileged the artist's 'touch,' he found ways to physically distance himself from his work. An older African American painter Ed Clark (1926-2019) had pioneered this gambit earlier by painting with a janitor's push broom. Whitten took the technology further by inventing instruments from scratch, among them a 12-foot-wide version of a squeegee or rake — he called it the 'Developer' — with which he could apply a wide layer of paint to a horizontal canvas. Beginning in 1974, he used the instrument — an original version is propped against a wall — to produce a series of paintings he referred to as 'slabs.' Each painting consisted of several successive layers of paint with drying times of varying lengths between applications. In a finishing gesture, he dragged the squeegee, in one quick stroke, across the top of the 'slab' to uncover the layers beneath, a process he likened to the exposure of film to light in photography. The chromatic and textural variety achieved is truly virtuosic, both in the original 1974 series and in the variations that followed as he shifted his palette from color to black and white; his abstract mode from quasi-gestural to geometric; and the method of making the painting from horizontal to vertical orientation. All of this would probably have been enough to establish and sustain a long career, but big changes were still to come. New media arrived. After an artist residency at the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, N.Y., Whitten started painting and drawing with photocopy toner on paper. And after establishing a pattern of spending summers in Greece — the home of his wife Mary's parents — he focused his time there on producing an extraordinary body of African-inspired sculptures, carved from local wood and embedded with nails, tools and electronic detritus. In 1980, Whitten's TriBeCa studio was destroyed in a fire, and while renovating a new one he stopped making art for three years. When he began again it was with a set of newly invented forms and techniques. And from this point on an already powerful exhibition — organized by Michelle Kuo, chief curator at large, with an all-MoMA team led by Dana Liljegren with Helena Klevorn — lifts off into the stratosphere. The innovations were of two related kinds, both of which involved turning acrylic paint into a sculptural material. Using paint he made casts of objects he found on New York City streets — bottle caps, tire treads, manhole covers — and attached these casts, assemblage-style, to canvases or wood panels. The culminating work in this format is a 20-foot-long mural-like memorial to the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, an event that Whitten witnessed firsthand. A pyramidal pileup of molds of shoes and glass and metal shards mixed with ash and dirt from the site, the piece has the entrapping weight of a PTSD nightmare and is as powerful a response to a still unthinkable event as I've seen in art. Actually, much of Whitten's art, starting with the 1964 Birmingham assemblage, is commemorative. And with another formal innovation, the use of acrylic mosaic, he introduced a versatile language for such content. You find it in pieces dedicated to the artist's mother and father, and in an exuberant 1998 shout out — an image of a sleek blackbird rocketing skyward —- to the irrepressible jazz singer Betty Carter, who died that year. And it has its most dramatic expression in the series of tributes called 'Black Monoliths' that appeared from the late 1980s through the end of the artist's life. These are dedicated to individual figures who shaped Whitten, either from a distance as public figures (Muhammad Ali, Representative Barbara Jordan), or through personal acquaintance. There's Jacob Lawrence, who mentored the young artist with career and life advice in New York. And James Baldwin, who showed him how to make Black identity and creativity one thing. And Ornette Coleman, one of the musicians who gave Whitten ways to connect, in what we might now call an Afrofuturistic approach, abstraction to science, politics and spirituality. The twilit gallery where the 'Monoliths' hang, black and glowing with their admixtures of bright-color tesserae and pearlescent dust, may be the single most beautiful room of contemporary art in any New York City museum right now. And the work in it defines the idea of identity in the way the introductory Blakey tribute does: as inclusive and expansive, cosmic and specific, monumental and molecular. Whitten spoke, with wishful optimism, of wanting to be an artist-citizen of the world, a world in which 'there is no race, no color, no gender, no territorial hangups, no religion, no politics. There is only life.' Life is what this great show of his fantastically inventive art is filled with.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
$2.2 Million Worth of Ancient Artifacts Trafficked Through New York Are Returning to Greece and Italy
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office recently announced the recovery of two groups of ancient artifacts that would be returned to Greece and Italy. A repatriation ceremony took place on February 25 for 11 ancient Greek artifacts, including a votive figurine from 1300-1200 BCE and a marble funerary relief from 4th-3rd century BCE. More from Robb Report 3 Men Are on Trial for Allegedly Stealing and Selling a $6 Million Gold Toilet How a Former Hollywood Exec Turned a Derelict Italian Villa Into a Stunning Home Inside Trailblazing Artist Jack Whitten's First Retrospective Show at MoMA Other artifacts being returned include a Hellenistic statuette of the mythical heroine Atalanta, an aryballos depicting a battle scene from 600-500 BCE, and a Dionysian kantharos from the 4th century BCE. The collection of items were recovered by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and are valued at approximately $1 million, according to a report by the Athens newspaper Kathimerini. The news followed the announcement from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. on February 18, of 107 objects valued at $1.2 million that would be sent back to Italy. The artifacts had been recovered from multiple ongoing investigations and were connected to several known smugglers of antiquities, including Giacomo Medici, Giovanni Franco Becchina, and Robert Hecht. Some of the recovered pieces were also connected to London-based art dealer Robin Symes, who was convicted of contempt of court for lying about antiquities he held in storage locations around the world in 2005; and Swiss gallery owner Herbert Cahn. Among the most notable items were a Terracotta Kylix Band-Cup from the middle of the 6th Century BCE, a Apulian Volute Krater from 320-310 BCE, and a Bronze Patera fropm 4th Century BCE. The press release said the Kylix, a type of drinking cup 'was found and illegally excavated from the Etruscan archaeological site of Vulci in the 1960s before it was smuggled out of Italy by the New York and Paris-based dealer Robert Hecht. It was eventually acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017 where it remained until it was seized' by the office's Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU). The Krater, a terracotta vase from a Greek colony in Southern Italy, was allegedly trafficked by Almagia into New York and sold to a Manhattan based gallery before 1987. The ATU recovered it from a private collection last year. The patera bowl was smuggled out of Italy by convicted antiquities trafficker Gianfranco Becchina, made its way to New York-based antiquities dealer Mathias Komor, and sold to the present owner before it was also seized by the ATU earlier this year. The announcement also noted that Edoardo Almagià had also been charged and was the subject of an arrest warrant. On February 24, the Metropolitan Museum of Art also announced it was returning a 7th-century bronze head donated by a former trustee head to Greece following a review internally of its provenance records. The museum's researchers concluded it was likely illegally removed from the Archaeological Museum of Olympia in the 1930s, though details of the removal aren't known. Best of Robb Report The 10 Priciest Neighborhoods in America (And How They Got to Be That Way) In Pictures: Most Expensive Properties Click here to read the full article.
Yahoo
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Inside Trailblazing Artist Jack Whitten's First Retrospective Show at MoMA
'When my paintings cease to be challenging, I will simply find something else to do,' Jack Whitten wrote in a 1988 letter to the artist and eminent scholar of African American art David Driskell. Whitten, who died in 2018 at the age of 78, never did need to find another way to fill his time. Respected for his hungry mind and his ceaseless experimentation—but perhaps never fully given his due—Whitten is the subject of his first comprehensive retrospective, opening March 23 at the Museum of Modern Art. It's an appropriate host: The first museum he visited in New York City, MoMA began acquiring his work in the 1970s. 'He fits so perfectly into the mission of trying to better understand modern- and contemporary-art figures who have been watershed and yet may not have gotten the recognition that they've deserved thus far,' says Michelle Kuo, MoMA's chief curator at large and publisher, who met Whitten in 2011 and organized the exhibition. More from Robb Report The Barnes & Noble Founder's Widow Is Auctioning Off Her $250 Million Art Collection A Long-Lost Camille Claudel Sculpture Sells for $3.8 Million in Paris Blink-182 Cofounder Mark Hoppus's Banksy Painting Could Fetch $6.3 Million at Auction The show's more than 175 works will span nearly six decades of his practice, which explored the Civil Rights Movement, science, and technology via an impressive range of disciplines including painting, sculpture, collage, photography, printmaking, and music. A tenor saxophonist, he brought an improvisational approach to his work. Born in 1939 in Jim Crow Alabama—he labeled the all-encompassing segregation 'American apartheid'—Whitten learned to paint with the materials left behind by his mother's first husband, a sign painter who had his own business, a rarity for a Black man in that milieu. Whitten's first paid commission was a civil-rights poster. He entered college on the pre-med track but then changed course and began to study art. Eventually, he made his way to New York, where he was the only Black student in his class at the Cooper Union. He arrived in 1960, when the art world was still small enough that a newbie could drink at its undisputed canteen, the Cedar Tavern, with his Abstract Expressionist idols—Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline—and find mentorship from a trio of Black artists who'd made their mark: Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Norman Lewis. Whitten lived on the Lower East Side, where he marveled at the racial integration. He also immersed himself in jazz circles, meeting John Coltrane and Art Blakey, whom he likened to a witch doctor on drums. At a time when many Black artists felt pressure to use a representational style to advance social activism, Whitten embraced abstraction as a potent lens on the world's ills, pushing the genre forward with inventive techniques that he carefully tracked in his studio log. In the early 1970s, he developed one of his best-known techniques: He poured layers of paint into 'slabs' on the ground, then used rakes, squeegees, Afro picks, and other tools to dig grooves, creating apertures into what lay beneath the surface. He also did a residency at Xerox, a catalyst in his experiments with chemicals used in photocopying. Around 1990, Whitten hit upon his signature mosaic method, building thin layers of acrylic paint, then cutting the dried surface into 'tiles,' which he then re-formed intuitively into mesmerizing shapes and swirls. 'It almost looks like he just had a field of tiles and then splattered them,' Kuo says. 'But if you look closely, you see that each tile is not continuous with the other. It's this recombined, incredibly intricate, multi-dimensional puzzle.' Whitten long spent his summers with his family in Greece—he would sign out of his New York studio log with the simple 'Gone fishing.' On the island of Crete, he'd connect with ancient Cycladic art and Byzantine mosaics and make sculpture using local materials. The retrospective's subtitle, The Messenger, nods to both one of his works—a canvas ode to Art Blakey—and his mission. Says Kuo: 'I see him as someone who channeled or even transformed experiences with grave injustice throughout his life into a kind of visionary beauty. He often said, 'I am a conduit.' ' Best of Robb Report The 10 Priciest Neighborhoods in America (And How They Got to Be That Way) In Pictures: Most Expensive Properties Click here to read the full article.
