Jack Whitten's Black Monoliths: Born in Bessemer

Whitten's maturity and artistic career were spent in New York, where he arrived in 1960.

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during the flowering of the abstract expressionist movement. This mid-century quite is reflected in his work of the period. Whitten worked among the artists of the New York School, particularly with Willem DeKooning, but apparently also maintained an independence from them, associating with other artists of color and experimenting with his own ideas about abstraction.

Before New York, however, Whitten studied at Tuskegee Institute and then Southern University in Baton Rouge, where he discovered his calling for art. His move to New York had as much to do with his despair at Southern intransigence during the civil rights reform movement as with any intention of participating in the Cooper Union—which in fact he he did. Entering art school at age 21 was Whitten's first experience as the lonely black man in a white environment.

Of the many bodies of work represented in Five Decades of Painting, I find myself most fascinated by works started during the 1990s, the Black Monoliths that honor Whitten's African-American heroes and friends. As in Tribute to Ralph Ellison above, each of them is a mosaic made up of thousands of colorful tesserae. Each tile is formed from acrylic paint (and any additives). As the detail is difficult to interpret on such a small scale as in these photos, I emphasize that the tiles do not contain an image, only color.