Jack Whitten: The Messenger at MOMA
Jack Whitten (1939–2018) began his artistic practice in resistance. Emerging from the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, he turned abstraction into a way of responding to reality—and into a mode of seeing when visibility was denied. His practice cut through life, politics, and historical figures, leaving a sustained weight in time.
Jack Whitten: The Messenger, a full-career retrospective on MoMA’s sixth floor, follows a broadly chronological structure while interspersing works from different periods. Political paintings, material experiments with custom tools, and highly structured mosaics are spatially interwoven, forming a fragmented rhythm. Shifts in orientation, density, and the presence of jazz make viewing rich and intense. The exhibition extends Whitten’s own tempo, using installation itself to carry the position he once held—that of a messenger, sending meaning out into the world.
The first work encountered upon entering the exhibition is Black Monolith II (Homage to Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man) (1994). As a mosaic painting from the late 1990s, it is visually situated in a completely different temporal register from the other works in the first gallery, which are abstract paintings from the 1960s characterized by mixed materials, political urgency, and a sense of rawness, violence, and intensity. In contrast, this work is composed of densely arranged dark-toned mosaic tiles, more organized in structure and bearing a strong commemorative quality, dedicated to Ralph Ellison. It feels like a moment of looking back at history from the future.
The introductory text for the first gallery states, “Whitten was haunted by his past, troubled by the history of racial violence and the upheaval of the present.” The impact is one of temporal weight. History, figures, and political experience consistently intersect throughout Whitten’s practice. The exhibition begins here, setting the tone for the spatial structure and rhythm that follows.
This becomes immediately evident in the first gallery itself. Dense and heavy, the space presents his works from the 1960s, centered on politics, race, and historical violence. The room feels taut, and the pace of viewing becomes urgent, driven by the rawness of Whitten’s brushwork and the immediacy of his political response.
As one continues through the space, the exhibition layout begins to invite a brief hesitation. Each gallery can be entered from either side, with exits typically placed at the center. This nonlinear structure extends the pointillistic rhythm that runs through Whitten’s work. Race, technology, jazz, love, and war—these distinct themes surface and shift within the looseness of the spatial arrangement.
Upon entering the second gallery, the compositions become softer and brighter, the layout more open, and jazz begins to filter in—slowing the pace of viewing. Music appears only twice throughout the entire exhibition: once here, and again in the fifth gallery, which centers on commemorations of significant Black historical figures.
Rhythm, material, technique, and orientation all shift noticeably at this point. The surface is composed of pigment fragments, while custom-made tools carve texture into the composition, generating a more structured visual order. This sense of lightness and improvisation requires no explanation—space and sound communicate it fully. The tool “developer” displayed near the entrance acts like a footnote, quietly marking a turn in both historical moment and artistic approach.
The second gallery is a rupture within the overall structure of the exhibition, and also its most clearly articulated shift. The exhibition unfolds not in a linear progression, but in layered intervals. From certain angles, works from different decades come into view simultaneously. History doesn’t recede; it accumulates, insistently present.
At the center of the gallery, Mirsinaki Blue (1974) is a work in a state of complete release. The blue evokes the sea—not as scenery, but as a rhythm and a sound. The linear striations pulled across the surface by a custom-made tool, the “developer,” resemble waves, but also fields being tilled, or woven fabric—a slow force leaving its tracks. The pace here is entirely severed from the urgency of the previous gallery. The content no longer directly references historical figures or events, yet it feels more specific, as if fragments of memory and lived experience are sealed within.
Space, color, sound, and material all slow down in sync, beginning to unfold. The phrase “memory is trapped in the material” becomes, in this context, a bodily perception. The work echoes the sensibility of the room around it; here, the rhythm of making and the rhythm of viewing are reset.
The third and fourth galleries continue the visual language introduced in the second, but shift toward a more intensified form of experimentation. Randomness increases, a sense of speed intensifies, and the visual experience becomes more unstable. In contrast to the looseness and lightness of the previous section, the compositions here feel denser, and the act of viewing begins to verge on the dizzying—reflecting Whitten’s turn during this period toward the breakdown of binary structures and an engagement with psychological experience.
However, the spatial design introduces a form of unnecessary interference. A cluster of tall, closely spaced white columns divides the gallery into narrow pathways. This layout restricts physical movement and disrupts the flow of viewing. Visitors are required to navigate tight gaps, sometimes even crouch, in order to access the vitrines at the center. Rather than reinforcing the sense of uncertainty embedded in the works themselves, this design choice feels extraneous, out of step with the exhibition’s otherwise clear and well-paced spatial rhythm.
The fifth gallery had already begun to loosen the exhibition’s pacing, and the sixth extends this shift into a more expansive structure of viewing. Here, the exhibition arrives at a kind of open-ended sustain.
Atopolis: For Édouard Glissant (2014), Whitten’s largest painting project, is composed of eight connected canvases and occupies the entirety of the gallery’s final wall. Its scale and surface luminosity draw viewers in from a distance; viewing becomes a movement orchestrated by the work’s structure and materiality—one must approach, circle, and then step back. Compared to the previous galleries, with their varied degrees of tension and release, this room feels like a sudden opening—like the held breath at the end of a piece of music.
It continues the language of fragmented mosaic but shifts away from psychological or mnemonic concerns toward a more expansive abstract dimension. The layout here relaxes; it does not conclude the viewing, but rather opens it outward. Positioned near the exit, the work does not signal closure but instead reorients the act of looking toward elsewhere.
This spatial unfolding also brings the role of sculpture within the exhibition into clearer view. Whitten’s sculptures appear punctually throughout the show, with nearly every gallery anchored by one that resonates with its thematic focus. Homage to Malcolm, in the first gallery, addresses Black political struggle and historical memory; Memory Container, in the second, echoes concerns with material, memory, and rhythmic construction. These sculptures—denser and more materially assertive—stand in visual juxtaposition to the surrounding paintings and serve as condensed nodes in Whitten’s evolving language, or as milestones marking shifts in his process.
Three late sculptures appear at the exit of the exhibition. These wooden works are not housed within the galleries but placed outside, in an open-air transitional space. At this location, they seem no longer part of the exhibition’s internal logic, but rather like a delayed footnote. Their presence recalls tombstones or monuments—quiet, grounded, and in direct contact with air beyond the institution’s walls. It is here that a sense of real emotional weight sets in, grounded in the sculptures' quiet monumentality and their exposure to open air.
Yining Fang, 2025