On Whitten's pioneering 1970s series marking his move away from
gestural painting
The first publication to delve deeply into Jack Whitten's Greek
Alphabet paintings (1975-78), this volume examines this remarkable
series, which consists of variations on abstract, black-and-white
compositions and experiments in mark-making. For these works, Whitten
employed handmade tools and techniques including the comb, imprint and
frottage.
The series is illuminated through essays by art historian Courtney J.
Martin and Dia curators Donna De Salvo and Matilde Guidelli-Guidi.
Authors Fred Moten and Gregg Bordowitz provide poetic reflections on
Whitten's art, biography and cultural importance. Materials from
Whitten's archives, including his own personal writings, supplement this
unprecedented publication.
In his lifetime, Whitten never had the opportunity to exhibit more than
a handful of these works. In publishing a significant number of these
paintings together for the first time--with 40 color plates representing
the 60-some paintings in the series--Jack Whitten: The Greek Alphabet
Series makes possible a fuller appreciation of the formal and material
permutations of Whitten's practice.
Jack Whitten (1939-2018) was born in Bessemer, Alabama, studied art
at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and moved to New York
in 1960, where he had a solo exhibition at the Whitney in 1974 and a
10-year retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1983. In 2014, a
retrospective was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in San
Diego, traveling to the Wexner Center in 2015 and the Walker Art Center
in 2015-16. Whitten lived in Queens, New York, where he died in 2018.
