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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Artist Jack Whitten's New Major MoMA Retrospective
00:26:22
MoMA has just opened a major retrospective of artist Jack Whitten
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WNYC Studios
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Host
In 1959, a young man named Jack Whitten was studying pre med at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute when suddenly he changed his life forever. He decided to drop out, become an artist and move to New York to to pursue his dream. And for the rest of us, it's a good thing that he made that choice because the Museum of Modern Art has just opened a new major retrospective of Jack Whitt work. Whitten died in 2018 at the age of 78, but he left behind over 50 years of abstract, experimental, improvisational and highly technical paintings. His work earned him a Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2015. Whitten was inspired by jazz, the cosmos, black leaders, the civil rights movement. He dedicated years to the material of the paint itself. He was fascinated by finding new ways to mix and manipulate acrylics, fascinated by the process of making art. The MoMA retrospective is called Jack the Messenger. It opened earlier this week and is on view through August 2nd. You can see a sample of some of the paintings in the show on our Instagram story right now at all of it wnyc. And we have in studio with us Mersini Amadon, who is Jack's daughter and archival steward. Welcome Mercini.
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Mersini Amadon
Thank you.
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Host
And also Michelle Kuo, who's the lead MoMA director of this exhibition. Welcome.
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WNYC Studios
Thank you.
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Host
So let's talk about this transition that I mentioned from pre med student to artist. One, I'm wondering, Marcini, did he talk much about that decision and that transition? And two, as a mother I can imagine being like, wait, what? You're going to do what? Again, we're very glad he did it. And also I can imagine it was a really big, big earth shattering decision.
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Mersini Amadon
Well, my father describes it as having been basically like being struck by a bolt of lightning. He was in ROTC class, Air Force. He was studying to become a pre med doctor and something moved him to get up right in the middle of the class and just say out loud, what am I doing here? What am I doing here?
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Host
Saying out loud what? Some of us often just think, right?
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WNYC Studios
Yeah.
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Mersini Amadon
And he got himself away from Tuskegee and he went to Southern University and he studied art and Then he was getting very much involved with the civil rights movement at that time. And he had helped organize a march, which basically changed the direction of his life because people were throwing shit at these students who are just protesting. They want to be treated like grownups, like humans. And my father just said, you know what? I have to leave the South. I will either be killed or I will kill someone. And a teacher of his told him about Cooper Union. You can go to New York City. You can get into art school for free if you pass the test. And. And my dad got on a Greyhound bus after throwing all of his possessions into a big lake, and he got on a Greyhound bus, he came to New York, he took the test for Cooper, he got in, and he went to night school. And his entire world opened up. And for the first time in his entire life, he was in a classroom with white people. And he was surrounded by artists and by art and by museums and. And he loved going to moma.
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Host
We're talking about a moma retrospective called Jack Whitten the Messenger. It opened earlier this week. We have in studio with us Marsini Amadon, who is Jack's daughter and archival steward, and we also have Michelle Kuo, who's the lead MoMA curator of this exhibition. Michelle, let's talk a little bit about his childhood, which, you know, backing up from this Tuskegee moment of revelation into his childhood. He grew up in the Jim Crow south in Alabama. He's the son of a seamstress and a coal miner. He referred later to Jim Crow as American apartheid. I'm wondering how we see those views and his childhood represented in his work.
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WNYC Studios
Jack Whitten had these extraordinary sensory experiences as a child in the south, one of which was going to the steel mills and the iron ore quarries and coal mines. Because of racial segregation, he and his fellow students, classmates, could not visit museums, but instead, his teachers took them on tours of these steel mills and mines and quarries. And so in the show at MoMA, you're going to see incredible, luminous paintings that remind you of hot rolled iron, corten steel, of minerals, of quarries, of these kinds of very dense, sometimes even crystalline materials.
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Host
What age group was he, or what age was he taken into those. Toured those facilities?
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WNYC Studios
I think, when he was in grade school, and his father also was a coal miner as well.
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Host
It's astonishing, isn't it, Marsini, that that can have such a. I mean, you know, not to, like, lean too heavily on the, like, mining aspect of this or the, like, hot ore thing, but, like, such a Searing effect on him as a child that we see it so much later in his work. How does it make you feel to see those periods of his life represented in his work?
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Mersini Amadon
I did not grow up with those paintings because they were made when I was two years old, four years old. But for me, it's my dad's youth. It's the representation of his family, of our family. It's the south put into a painting.
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Host
What did he talk about when he talked. Did he talk to you about that growing up in Alabama, what it was like?
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Mersini Amadon
He tried not to. He was not someone who talked too much about the past. He was always looking more towards the future, towards optimism, towards hope. When he would talk about the past, he would talk about his neighbors. He had all these weird neighbors. My mother always was convinced that he. He was making up stories. But apparently there really were these two sisters who lived next door, and they had a terrible fight. One sister brained the other one with a glass bottle and then sewed up her forehead. That's actually a true story. The south in Alabama is filled with crazy and gothic and horror, but it's also filled with community and tightness and the church, which kept everyone together. So he would talk about how important community is, and he kept that feeling all the way through his life. It was always important to have community.
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Host
When he became an artist, he became very involved in the civil rights movement. Was he always an activist, sort of at his core?
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Mersini Amadon
Yes, absolutely. I don't think that you can grow up at that time and not have a burning desire to see change and to be part of that change. He was making posters in high school. He was organizing marches and different things. And even in high school, he demonstrated. He demonstrated then and all the way through. You had to do it, because how else could we survive as black people? You just. You get to a breaking point.
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Host
We. One of the ways we see that in his work, Michelle, is in his portrayal of black leaders. Right. So tell us about that and who we might see in the exhibit.
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WNYC Studios
Well, it's a great question, because, in fact, you may not see any of their faces or likenesses. Jack Whitten was an abstract artist, which means that he creates paintings and sculptures and drawings that are really almost prompting a change in your perception. It might be dazzling, dazzling colors or scintillating lights or incredible surfaces and materials, but they're not exactly depicting a person, even though they're dedicated to them. And Jack Witten always said, actually, for example, Miles Davis is in the paint. He's in there. And he saw his works as embodying his subjects.
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Host
Talk about that work, specifically about the Miles Davis work.
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WNYC Studios
It's a gorgeous painting in black and white called Homecoming for Miles. And it's made of this incredible process that Witten invented. He invented many new techniques of art making in his lifetime. This particular one, he dried and hardened slabs or sheets of acrylic paint and then sliced them into tiles, like mosaic tiles, and then recombined them as if it's like the most complicated multidimensional puzzle you've ever into. A kind of galactic sweep of black and white. It looks like stars, but it also looks like a kind of cosmic net, is what he called it.
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Host
That's an amazing phrase, Mersini. I'm wondering, did he feel a certain responsibility to honor these people through his work?
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Mersini Amadon
Absolutely, because he wanted to honor not only his friends. One of the pieces in the show is for Bobby Short. And my father considers many paintings that aren't necessarily called black monoliths, but they still are. There are ways of honoring and tell.
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Host
Us what we mean when we're talking about black monoliths for folks who don't know.
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Mersini Amadon
Okay, So a black monolith is someone who has done good in the black community that we can look up to. This is someone that we can respect that has made a huge impact. Ralph Ellison on black life. Ralph Ellison. Maya Angelou.
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Host
Muhammad Ali.
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Mersini Amadon
Muhammad. Oh, of course. Muhammad Ali. Amiri Baraka. And it felt very, very important to him that you honor these people in the best way that he knew how, which was to put them into the paint, put their spirit into the painting. So when you look at the painting, you almost get a vibration of this person.
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Host
One of his works that I love. And I know, Michelle, you said we don't see an actual. We're not going to see a portrait. Right. In the way that a lot of people think about a portrait. Right. Like, here's somebody's face that we can look at. Right. But speaking of Ralph Ellison, the Invisible man, it looks like an outline of a human being. I mean, the play on the Invisible man and all, it's just astounding to me. It's absolutely one of my favorites. And I just want you to talk about it.
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WNYC Studios
There is this figure, silhouette, that's ghost like, but it also looks a bit like a slice of bread in profile. And Witten was looking at all of these things embedded into that painting. There's this kind of shape of a head, but also it's made with those mosaic tiles of acrylic PA that he's dried and hardened but almost uses like amber. So embedded in that painting are eggshells, rust, molasses, even a small razor blade.
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Host
Okay, I just have to talk from an archivist's point of view. Like, how are you saving something like eggshells for the next generations to view? I can imagine, I don't know, as an art archivist, that there are people who are hand wringing over that.
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WNYC Studios
They're actually almost. They're embedded in this acrylic medium. So in a way. So they're frozen, they're preserved. Just like artifacts would be preserved in amber.
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Mersini Amadon
Yeah, Think of insects in amber. It's exactly like that. The eggshell isn't sticking out of the tile. It's completely encased within this acrylic paint.
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Host
Well, and how silly of me to think that he wouldn't have thought of that.
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Mersini Amadon
Well, my mother is a paper conservator, so we care int.
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WNYC Studios
Advantage. He had an advantage.
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Host
I'm sure there were opinions that were. That were given on that issue.
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Mersini Amadon
Always.
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Host
Yeah. So I read in the Times that few artists are as closely associated with lower Manhattan. We are in lower Manhattan. For people listening may not know where our studio studios are. We are in lower Manhattan right now. Few people as closely associated with lower Manhattan as Jack Whitten. I'm going to put the question to both of you. We'll start with you, Mercini. Why? Why? For someone listening on the far flung reaches of the planet who might not know, what is it about him that is so imbued in this area?
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Mersini Amadon
Well, one of his first studio spaces was on the Lower east side. And then he heard about Soho and Tribeca, which at the time had gorgeous light, gorgeous big spaces that artists could go to that were affordable. And we never left. We came and we never left. And he loved it. Down. I grew up on Lisbonard street, which is only two blocks long. It's a little cobblestone street. And when I was a child, it was very, very, very, very quiet, which my dad needed for his work, for his studio. And he loved it. He always loved it. And he loved that there were other artists. So again, community. There were people that everyone would go to each other's studios, everyone would go to the shows and meet up with their friends and have Chinese food afterwards. It was a tight knit community of a lot of artists, none of us who had any money.
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Host
Yeah. Talk to us about his studio.
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Mersini Amadon
This studio was like an Aladdin's cave. It was my favorite place to be as a child. It was. And still is filled with paint, filled with these sparkling.
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Host
Were you allowed to touch things?
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Mersini Amadon
I was always allowed to touch things. It's quite difficult now to go to a gallery or a museum space, and I'm not allowed to touch. It's horrifying.
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Host
Yeah. But the preservation of that space as it was is important to Michel understand his process. He was a process artist, right?
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WNYC Studios
Yes.
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Host
I mean, so explain what that means.
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WNYC Studios
So every artist is a process artist in some way, but Jack Whitten might be the process artist. I really know of no other artist in art history of the modern times that invented so many different kinds of processes and techniques and signature styles. He didn't just have one look. He had maybe like 10 or 15. And so when you go to his studio now, as it's been preserved, there are incredible. It's like an alchemist lab got many different kinds of pigments. All those weird materials we just talked about, like eggshells and other kinds of phosphorescent gels or chemicals that he would add to the acrylic paint to make it dry slower or faster or more viscous or more liquid. So he's really doing all of these experiments to try and create what I can only describe as completely alchemical works that you just don't understand how he even really made them. And we've done this really fantast first technical study of his materials and artworks through MoMA's Conservation Lab. And they've analyzed all of these different things that he was using. But at the same time, there's always a bit of mystery when you look at his work. How did he really do that?
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Host
So give us another example of something we're going to see in the show where we're going to walk up and go, how in the heck did he do that? With whatever paint and materials and sort of mystical, you know, magical fairy dust. Fairy dust, yes. What will we. What should someone just walk in and walk right to, if that's what they're looking for?
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WNYC Studios
I think that one of the most incredible works is a painting called Pink Psyche Queen, and it's from 1973. It's incredible because it looks like Pink river in motion or a photographic blur of something that's moving at terrific speed. But it also almost looked like kind of lava coursing across. And he did this by creating many, many different layers of differently colored acrylic paint on his studio floor, so working horizontally instead of vertically, as an artist normally does. And then he would make all these layers with different drawing times. And then at the end, he invented a big wooden tool that he called the developer.
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Host
Yeah, I have notes on this.
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WNYC Studios
Ye in reference to photography. And he raked across that big wooden tool a final stroke, and he, quote, developed the image. But the thing is, if all of those layers of paint were wet, you would just see kind of a big soup instead. You see this almost elastic tearing of the surfaces of acrylic. So many layers, as if in motion, rushing by you.
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Host
Is this tool in the show?
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WNYC Studios
It is.
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Host
Okay, so describe for us what it like. I have no idea. It's a wooden.
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WNYC Studios
It looks like a big wooden T frame. Okay. At the edge is a large metal edge. Like, imagine the edge of a rake. But he could attach different materials to it, like neoprene rubber or a serrated edge, so that when he combed or raked across a big painting on the floor, he would change the whole structure of the paint to create that final image.
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Host
Got it. Some of these paintings are, to your point, Michel, very, very big. Mercini. What is it that he liked about working in size?
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Mersini Amadon
Because he could.
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Host
Yeah, I mean, I was going to try to, like. I was going to try to, like, make some sort of grand. And maybe it doesn't exist about taking up space.
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Mersini Amadon
Well, when you're told all your life that you can't take up space and now you have the freedom to do.
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Host
It, I'm gonna pull out this.
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Mersini Amadon
I'm gonna be the biggest I can. I'm gonna go the fastest I can. But he also made very, very, very small, very powerful paintings, which, when you see photographed, you can't tell how large.
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WNYC Studios
The painting is when he makes these mosaics. In fact, each little mosaic tile is sometimes a world unto itself. It's like a miniature painting with thousands of others constellated together.
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Host
You mentioned, Mercini, that you guys didn't have a lot of money growing up. Nope. Paint is expensive.
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Mersini Amadon
Paint is expensive.
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Host
Not to state the obvious, but. So talk to us about how he. Because there are some creative ways that he went about kind of fulfilling his need for more and more paint and paint that he needed to do what he, you know, was so compelled to do.
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Mersini Amadon
Well, he was very lucky because there was a man who owned a paint company named Lenny Beaucour. And my dad would call him Uncle Lenny, and he would write to Uncle Lenny and say, I need paint. And they would. We would trade. You would trade paint for a painting. So Lenny would send over paint. My dad would use it in these gorgeous, gigantic paintings that took a lot of paint. And then Lenny would end up With a painting.
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WNYC Studios
And you have to remember this is a moment when acrylic paint is relatively new. So artists like Whitten are.
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Host
And we're talking 70s here, right? Yes.
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WNYC Studios
Experimenting with this all the time.
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Mersini Amadon
Yeah. Which helps Lenny Bokor because he's finding out what. The properties of the paint that he creates.
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Host
Sure.
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Mersini Amadon
What the property is. I mean, like, no one really knows. What can you do with this amazing, amazing material? And I think it was a lot of fun for artists at that time to have this material that's very stable and you can do whatever you want with it.
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Host
The 70s were sort of a turning point for him, Michel. Artistically, we see a transformation in his work if we're looking strictly at it from a timeline, from A to B. How will people see, you know, the evolution of his work from and to and in and out of abstract, you know, expressionism, Whatever he was. Whatever he was doing what. Where are those mile markers for him?
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WNYC Studios
It's pretty uncanny because what I learned was that it's almost like clockwork at the start of every decade. 1970, 1980, 1990. It's like Jack Whitten wakes up and says, I'm gonna do something totally new. So there's this very interesting decade by decade chronology there. He. He really does completely transform at the beginning of each of those years. And I think the 70s is interesting because often, still, when we think about contemporary art, the 70s kind of gets lost in the mix between the 60s and the 80s. And for Jack Whitten, it's an absolutely crucial time. And to be committed to painting, when actually many other artists were kind of leaving painting behind, speaks of an incredible dedication to that medium into the exploration that he was making.
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Host
I know this isn't on topic, but. And going to what?
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WNYC Studios
And going to, let's say, photography. Photography or performance or all of these new ways of making art. And in fact, Jack Whitten was exploring all of those aspects of new art as well. It's just that he ended up putting it back into the paint.
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Host
Did he, Marsini? Did he talk about those artistic changes? Or was it just more of a. Like, you know what? Today I'm doing this.
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Mersini Amadon
My father talked nonstop about his art and about painting. So every day around the dinner table, he'd talk about what painting he was working on, if it was pushing back on him, if it was causing problems, if things were going well in the studio or not. So I guess it was a constant conversation.
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WNYC Studios
Yeah, he writes about it all the time as well, in a kind of daily studio log. Or some of those pages are in the show and in the book. But he will write things like an entry that says, I am 40 years old today. I'm broke. I'm sick, but do you think I'm not happy? No. I'm an artist. I'm supposed to confront these challenges. I have my family, I have my art. I love my life. It's like a diary, and it's really. It shows him working through all of these problems and struggles and challenges, but also these amazing breakthroughs.
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Host
Let's talk about the influence of jazz a little bit. So first of all, you mentioned, Michelle, you mentioned Miles Davis. He has another one, Art Blakely. So how do we see jazz in his work?
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WNYC Studios
Jazz is completely fundamental. He himself played the tenor saxophone. His brother was a jazz musician. And when he gets to New York City, he starts going to all the clubs, seeing all the shows and meetings, leading musicians. So, for example, John Coltrane, as the legend goes, Jack Whitten, ran after him one day after a show and said, you know, explain to me your music. And John Coltrane says to Witten, it's like a wave, and that he creates sheets of sound. So Jack Whitten turns around and said, you know what? I want to make sheets of light. And there's an incredible work in the show called Light Sheet One that is this kind of abstract pouring forth of waves that you see. So Whitten was totally inspired by jazz. Sort of the sonic and the visual melding together, but also the idea of improvisation and experimentation in real time. That the sort of experiment itself is the performance. The play is the performance.
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Host
Right, Michelle? I mean, I know we can't tell people what to take from this exhibition, this retrospective. Mersini, as his daughter. What would you hope someone would take? What would you ask that someone try to take with them?
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Mersini Amadon
I ask them to come in. And you can come in on many different levels. You can come in a person off the street knowing nothing and go, wow, those are some really pretty pictures. Those are really pretty colors. Wow, that's really a glowing pink. That's an orange. And that's fine. Take that. You can also come in and go, wow, is this man into science fiction? Which he was. He adored Star Trek. And you can look at the titles and go, what's this title about? What's this have to do with Miles Davis? You can't. Curiosity, just lots of curiosity. Come in with an open mind.
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Host
Yeah. Okay, Michelle, last plug.
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WNYC Studios
This runs through August 2nd.
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Host
Okay. We've been talking about a new exhibition called Jack the Messenger. It is on view at MOMO right now through as Michelle said August 2nd. We've been talking with Jack's daughter Mersini Amadan and with the curator Michelle Kuo. Thank you so much for your time.
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Mersini Amadon
Thank you.
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