Jack Whitten

(1939–2018)

Jack Whitten spent his career developing a resolutely political mode of abstract painting in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Growing up in the Jim Crow South, Whitten met Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X at an early age, encounters that later inspired his artistic practice. He deployed a wide variety of materials and devices to make his paintings, including Afro picks, squeegees, Xerox printing, stones, and sheet metal. The resulting works are complex meditations on race, technology, war, and memory. Whitten produced several works related to President Obama’s election, such as his 2011 painting Apps for Obama, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2015.