HOUSTON, TX.- The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will present Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017 —the first major exhibition dedicated to sculptures by renowned American contemporary artist Jack Whitten. While Whitten has long been celebrated for his work as an innovative abstract painter, this exhibition reveals an extensive and entirely unknown body of the late artist’s work. Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017 will feature 40 of Whitten’s sculptures made over the course of his five-decade career—each created with a diverse spectrum of materials, including wood, marble, copper, bone, fishing wire, and personal mementos— and a selection of his paintings. The exhibition will be on view March 3 to May 27, 2019, following presentations last year at the organizing institutions, The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017 has introduced the public to a hidden body of work by this contemporary master, drawing attention to the cultural traditions and figures that have influenced Whitten’s work,” said Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “We are pleased with the opportunity to bring this revelatory exhibition to Houston.”
“I am continually fascinated by the breadth of styles, techniques, and materials that Whitten’s sculpture encompasses. From nails to bones to wire to even circuit boards in an array of forms and with a range of personal and cultural references, these objects constitute not only Whitten’s truly original ways of making art, but also his intensely and fully cultivated worldview,” said Kanitra Fletcher, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the MFAH.
Whitten (1939–2018) was one of the most important artists of his generation. His paintings feature groundbreaking experimentation with abstraction, including recent processand material-based work memorializing African American historical figures, such as Barbara Jordan and W.E.B Du Bois. Whitten began carving wood in 1962 in order to understand African sculpture, both aesthetically and in terms of his own identity as an African American. His introduction to African art came when he visited the Brooklyn Museum in New York as a young man in the summers of 1958 and 1959. The encounters left a lasting impression, as he believed African sculpture was a vital inheritance for artists working in the African diaspora.
Whitten’s art grew in unexpected ways when, in 1969, he began spending summers on the island of Crete. There, Whitten was inspired by ancient Cycladic and Minoan objects, recognizing their functional role in society as repositories of power, memory, sensuality, and spirituality, much like the African works he had seen in New York institutions. The resourcefulness of the people in Crete and their connection to nature and to material life recalled his own upbringing in Alabama. In Crete, his materials expanded to incorporate local wood and marble, as well as bones left over from his fishing excursions. These organic materials—shaped by techniques such as carving and burning—imbued his sculptures with a profound connection to ritual, nature, and the most fundamental experiences of human life. Whitten saw his work as just the latest episode in a long history of exchange between Africa, the African diaspora, and the Mediterranean. As the artist wrote in his studio log in 1975, “I am aware of the fact that this is the tradition in Art which I must connect with—a work of art with a function motivated by the tradition of African sculpture—MY WAY—not Picasso’s European interpretation.”
Whitten’s sculptures will be joined by several paintings, many of which come from his Black Monolith series honoring African American cultural figures—including Ralph Ellison, Jacob Lawrence, and Ornette Coleman—revealing the connection between Whitten’s paintings and his previously unknown sculptures, and also marks the first time these works have been exhibited together.
