Seen: April 26, 2025
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Jack Whitten: The Messenger
March 23 - August 3, 2025
His Xerox works are particularly revealing, demonstrating an early engagement with mechanical reproduction, chance, and fragmentation as generative forces, with the machine functioning as an active collaborator rather than a neutral tool. In dialogue with these works, the large-scale abstract paintings assert a powerful material and emotional presence, built through unconventional methods and custom tools that compress and drag acrylic into dense, architectural surfaces. Together, these bodies of work underscore Whitten’s belief that abstraction could absorb memory, history, and cultural weight without figuration, and that innovation in technique was fundamental to meaning rather than incidental to it.