Jack Whitten: The Messenger – Hardcover

“A book as rich with insight as the show itself” — ArtNews

“A Peak MoMA Moment . . . sweeping and scintillating . . . an art whose messages are historical, mystical, personal, by a radically inventive artist who ranks right at the top of abstraction’s pantheon” — New York Times

“[The] retrospective of the major abstract painter Jack Whitten . . . blew our reviewer away.” — Washington Post

“The American artist moved from the segregated South to the New York art world and beyond as he forged unique processes . . . which are now on view in a staggering retrospective.” — Wall Street Journal

Edited by Michelle Kuo, with contributions by Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Anna Deavere Smith, Sampada Aranke, Mark Godfrey, Michael Duffy, Annie Wilker, Dana Liljegren, George E. Lewis, Richard Shiff.

Jack Whitten (1939–2018) offered the world a new way to see. Raised under racial segregation in the US South, Whitten moved to New York in 1960 and, over the next six decades, dared to invent novel techniques for making art, with tools and materials ranging from acrylic paint to Afro-combs to electrostatic printing. A lifelong advocate for Civil Rights and social justice, Whitten was under great pressure to produce realistic art as a means of activism. But he persisted in creating revelatory forms of abstract art—and, in the process, changed the relationship between culture, society, and memory.

Published to accompany the first comprehensive survey of Whitten’s remarkable career, held at The Museum of Modern Art, this beautifully illustrated volume features major contributions by prominent writers, artists, and curators including Michelle Kuo, Julie Mehretu, Glenn Ligon, Anna Deavere Smith, and George E. Lewis; pathbreaking technical studies of Whitten’s ingenious methods and innovative materials; and newly published archival photographs, documents, and the artist’s own writings reflecting on his singular journey—for which art, he said, was his “compass to the cosmos.”