Meet Jack Whitten, the history-making artist who invented his own tools and art materials and made new breakthroughs in abstraction each decade after he arrived in New York in 1960. This short documentary offers a rare glimpse into Whitten’s groundbreaking techniques and creative process. We visit Whitten’s studio in New York, a former firehouse turned “laboratory for acrylic paint,” which remains largely untouched since his death in 2018. There, his daughter and wife explain how the collection of historical images and objects he surrounded himself with gives us a view “inside his brain” and relates to his experiences growing up in the segregated South during the Civil Rights movement. As MoMA curator Michelle Kuo describes, “Whitten transformed righteous anger into a kind of dazzling beauty.” We follow the journey of MoMA conservators as they conduct the first major study of Whitten’s works, decoding the mystery of his techniques and process. At its heart, this film celebrates Whitten’s philosophy, which holds that art can be a “conduit of the spirit” and “a compass to the cosmos.” While Whitten mined the soul and essence of a people in a historic struggle for liberation, this documentary aims to honor and preserve his own.
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The Museum of Modern Art
