Jack Whitten's Black Monoliths: Born in Bessemer

Jack Whitten, Black Monolith II: Homage to Ralph Ellison
The Invisible Man, 1994, Acrylic, molasses, copper, salt, coal,
ash, chocolate, onion, herbs, rust, eggshell, razor blade
on canvas, 58 x 52." Brooklyn Museum, William K.
Jacobs Fund 2014.65

Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting runs through August 2 at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The show displays fifty works by an artist of outrageous originality and dynamism. So driven by the need to experiment is this man that, were labels withheld, a gallery visitor might reasonably assume this to be a group show of six or seven abstract artists. 

While the show, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, refers to Whitten as a painter, I think this artist would much more precisely be called a fabricator rather than a painter through much of his career. One often sees this impulse in printmakers and sculptors, for whom innovation with processes and materials can be as important as the glimmer of the image down the road. Whitten works with acrylic paint, but he has rarely made works that would be universally identified as "paintings." He has used acrylic in its liquid form not only to carry pigment for making images, but also for its industrial properties: It is elastic; it can be layered and separated; it can be molded or cut; its colors can be blended or separated in sheets. Acrylic is plastic.

I think the direction of Whitten's artistic inquiry has to have been shaped by location. He was born in 1939 and grew up in Bessemer, Alabama, a close western suburb of Birmingham. Heavy industry dominates the whole region, which is known for ore mining, iron smelting, and the manufacture of railroad cars, including Pullman Standards. Bessemer's African-American population has always hovered around 75%. The labor for the city's vast industries was provided by integrated unions. Whitten's father was a coal miner; his mother was a seamstress. 

1950 map showing heavy industry in Birmingham, Alabama and suburbs. Bessemer would lie in the lower right area, approximately
eight miles from Birmingham.

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

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

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

Of the many bodies of work represented in Five Decades of Painting, I find myself most fascinated by works begun during the 1990's, the Black Monoliths that honor Whitten's African American heroes and friends. As in the Homage to Ralph Ellison above, each of these is a mosaic composed of thousands of colored tesserae. Each tile is formed from acrylic paint (and any additives). Since detail is difficult to interpret at such a reduced scale as in these pictures, I point out that the tiles don't contain image, only color.

 Jack Whitten, Black Monolith IV For Jacob Lawrence, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 96 in. (243.8 x 243.8cm). Courtesy the artist, Alexander Gray Associates, New York; Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. ©2015 Jack Whitten/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Philipp Scholz Rittermann. 

 Jack Whitten, Black Monolith III (For Barbara Jordan), 1998, acrylic collage on canvas, 

69 x 65 ½ in. (175.3 x 166.4cm). Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint, Michigan.

©2015 Jack Whitten/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. 

Photo by Philipp Scholz Rittermann. 

Whitten makes no claim that these are attempts at portraiture, though it's difficult not to attach the idea of likeness to them in at least a rough way. The homage to Ralph Ellison, above, takes the form of an anonymous silhouette, the sort we see when a journalist interviews a person whose identity must be protected in order to maintain their safety. In this work though, the silhouette is nevertheless, in layer upon layer of irony, "the only Black in the room." While he is anonymous because he is faceless, he is unmistakable against the unbroken wall of white and blue, the two colors that provide no prayer of invisibility or protective coloration for a Black man. The homage is to the courageous daily bravery of the visually conspicuous, for whom freedom from invisible individuality remains so tortuous and tragic. 

When I encountered Black Monolith IV For Jacob Lawrence—breathtaking at eight feet by eight feet, yet every tessera worthy of scrutiny when you're close to it—I first thought I had come upon a remarkable map of Manhattan, glimmering and demarcated against a dark world. But then, there is also a strong resemblance to a capped (not hooded) smoking silhouette out of a Philip Guston painting—that ambiguous, vaguely threatening, possibly explosive character. Only after that did I see the title referring to Lawrence. Maybe both of my thoughts have a home in this work?

Lawrence's subject was the common life of African Americans—not always a visually attractive subject, given the poor material and social conditions in which so many lived. The series of painting with which he is perhaps most identified is his The Migration of the Negro, which tells the story of rural Blacks moving to the industrial cities of the north. Lawrence lived in New York City most of his life, having spent his earliest years in New Jersey, and moving with this wife to Seattle when he was in his fifties.

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration of the Negro, Panel One, 1941. Posted
 in accordance with fair use principles on Wiki Art.

Maybe it is a map of Manhattan, white Manhattan with conspicuous dikes raised against a coal-black sea. As an homage to Lawrence, perhaps Whitten reflects bleakly on African-American migration to cities where they haven't ultimately been integrated or their lives bettered? Where they remain immigrants? The Gustonian, alienated smoker neither sees nor  responds. He doesn't wear a hood anymore, but his anonymous indifference testifies to his enduring hostility.

However one interprets the particulars, Black Monolith IV strikes me overall as a phenomenal commentary on immigration in the 21st century. It is certainly the most pressing issue of our time as Africans, Middle Easterners, and Central Americans—people of color—risk all to reach Europe and America, whose nations bravely fight the tide and erect walls of all sorts against them.

I love Whitten's Black Monolith III (For Barbara Jordan) if only because it's not monolithic. A monolith is not only massive, but it is coherent and unified—which this so conspicuously is not. Whitten has also altered the shape of his support, giving it "shoulders" and sloping its sides inward toward the bottom: like a memorial or gravestone? Like a figure? 

The disposition of black and white tiles, while interspersed, nevertheless tends to converge in the suggestion of a torso. This notion is strengthened by the column that rises at the center top, out of the picture like a neck, giving the image the sense of an x-ray. Is that big dark shape a massive heart? This body lacks clear edges, quite unlike the others in the Monolith series and, again, contrary to the definition of the word. Perhaps this suggests Jordan's aptitude for politics, that art of compromise, of dancing between black and white to move people together while respecting the rights of those on the edges? The name for monolithic politics is tyranny.

 Jack Whitten, Black Monolith, V Full Circle: For LeRoi Jones A.K.A. Amiri Baraka, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 63 in. (213.4 x 160cm). Collection of Sheldon Inwentash and Lynn Factor, Toronto. ©2015 Jack Whitten/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Philipp Scholz Rittermann.

The experience of Full Circle: For LeRoi Jones A.K.A. Amiri Baraka is like looking at the Earth from a space ship, or through a telescope on the moon. The best part about it is that all the life of the universe is encapsulated on our planet, for there are no stars and no hint of any other life in a sky that is impenetrably black. It is a wonder that Whitten could manufacture so black a black as the space that surrounds this globe.

The globe, however, is infinity. By creating intensity at the center with lots of color and small elements, Witten draws the eye in ever deeper and we eagerly search beyond what we see. Though this caption provided identifies the materials here as "acrylic," it is a great jumble of collaged materials, not all of which are made of acrylic: There are lots of found materials as well, colorful, hard scraps of life.

In this there is almost no contrast between black and white. The edge is between blank black and black that is filled with color: with idea, life, and, above all, the representation of deep time. Here's an image of the history of the world in Baraka's color—all of his colors: the colors of thought, idea, travels, loves. This is also a mirror, it seems, for any viewer. You look at it less than you look into it. As you do, it's impossible not to want to find something, to see what you relate to, to pick out your place. In the other Monoliths, there are boundaries to consider and we are asked to deal with their significances for us. This one is different. The boundary is the ends of the earth and we cannot but fall in.

Viewing Whitten's Black Monoliths, I continue to be nagged by the memory of another artist from Bessemer, the wonderful self-taught artist, Thornton Dial. Dial was born in 1928 (Whitten in '39) and work in the fields before he moved to the city where he was a metal worker, in the Pullman factory particularly. Much of his art is sculpture made from re-purposed found materials, from tin cans to mattress springs. 

I think that there is a kinship between Whitten and Dial in that they share a deep central aesthetic of fabrication born in Black, industrial Bessemer. Dial was a manual laborer; Whitten was not. But I believe that Whitten's youth in a city that was all about manufacture, mining, and callous-producing labor affected his outlook as a visual artist. Five Decades of Fabrication?

Brian Porray's Big Picture at the Pizzuti Collection

It's too dazzling—too mind-bending—for even this writer to begin by wondering what it's all about. Brian Porray's painting, "|===FL4M3JOB===/", is on display until February on the first floor of the Pizzuti Collection's Now-ism show in Columbus. When I visit, it's the only work in the building. Who needs more? It's a mesmerizing world in itself. Measuring 96" x 216" (that's 8 x 18 feet), it's Porray's madcap world in two-an-a-half dimensions. Both nosed right up to it or standing across the room, the viewer is sucked right into its brilliant, revved up, op-art vortices. If it's a planet rotating on its own wonky axis, then we are zooming asteroids, drawn on collision course by its inexorable gravity field. 

Brian Porray, "|===FL4M3JOB===/", 2011. Synthetic polymer, spray paint, paper on canvas. 96 x 216."

The central section unfurls in a folding curve like an Oriental fan. It pulses with excitement like the gaudy, lit-up neon night on a crowded Tokyo street. Since we are stuck in the gallery with movement available in only one plane, the painting does the three-dimensional moving for us. Our heads swivel up and down; we look far into the distance; we may be looking into the cosmos via mysterious satellite signals. We are, at the least, the out-of-town gawkers dazzled by the colors, the brilliance, the heights. Those fanned, mashed-together columnar forms feel like skyscrapers crammed together, each refusing to be in the shadow of any other.

Brian Porray, detail, "|===FL4M3JOB===/", 2011.

Brian Porray, detail, "|===FL4M3JOB===/", 2011.

From across the room, this painting is an ebullient composition that mixes brilliant color with black and white. Close up, one sees that the black and white background  is created by what I take to be sticky-backed shelf paper with an endlessly repeated design. Grids of alternating white and black squares melt at the edges into framed spheres. This optical illusion underlies the fascination with geometrical forms—strict or skewed—that guide the eye through every neighborhood of the painting and across the whole. 

Brian Porray, detail, "|===FL4M3JOB===/", 2011.

Porray revels in geometrical games like this, testing our intuitive comprehension of perspective with silly signals and crafty cues that block it. He swings between meticulously presented geometrical forms and big, sloppy brush strokes applied devil-may-care that deny any concern with order.

Brian Porray, detail, "|===FL4M3JOB===/",
 2011.

Those detailed geometrical shapes, like the concentric circles framed by the square, and the sparkling disco sphere, in details above, are collaged paper additions to the painting. The many collaged bits sit right on the surface, unprotected by layers of varnish. They could be in a scrapbook: You see their edges and detect their matte surfaces clearly. As you go back and forth, investigating this great painting, you find all sorts of amusing collage elements that either reinforce the spatial weirdness (like the disco ball) or delight like a joke—note the tiny microphone and shades nestled away in a red hat on the left. These details balance the effect of the work's sheer size. It's a feat in itself that Porray creates and maintains such levity and such joy in a canvas of extraordinary size. Size tends to read as seriousness. He got over this assumption in a big way.

Brian Porray, detail, "|===FL4M3JOB===/",
 2011.

Another of Porray's surprising achievements is that "|===FL4M3JOB===/", for all its dynamism and futuristic feel, is very much a hand-made object. I find it thrilling that a work so hard and bright in appearance shows the artist's light touch. The fact that the collage elements are bare; that the spray painted swipes feel so delirious, and that the almost imperceptible layering is so cunning bespeak Porray's courage and craftsman.  

As one illustration of Porray's pains-taking, notice the paint drips all across the painting. In the photo to the right and in several above paint drips are visible. In the full view, it's clear that Porray uses drips a lot. On inspection, though, it's rarely clear where the drips actually begin, for their sources are usually disguised by new layers of collage. The reader may have to look very closely to find these, but red drips are apparent in the gray column toward the right, in the triangle-based column to its left, and about half-way up the column with diagonal stripes.

This is a mind-boggling work. How can an artist make a work that is so large, make it so electric, so vibrant, yet manage to do it over the immense amount of time it would take to make it? To create the effect of explosion, of a "flame job," over the period of months or years—to keep that energy alive—takes truly herculean effort involving as much frustration as sense of victory.

The more closely one observes the details of such a piece, the more respect one has for the patient craftsmanship and for the vast conceptual ability of the artist. The balance between his initial idea, serendipity, and improvisation is supremely difficult to maintain. Doubt and fatigue can undermine judgment over the long term.

We often forget, as viewers, to imagine this big picture, and to get lost criticizing details. When a work of art is as spectacularly successful on every level as something of this proportion, the achievement isn't the painting, but the gift transmitted through it of the artist's deep attention, deep thought, and extraordinary commitment to work. 

Thank you, Brian Porray.

George Morrison's Horizons

Spirit Path, New Day, Red Rock Variation: Lake Superior Landscape, 1990, acrylic and pastel on paper, 22 1/2 x 30 1/8 in. Collection Minnesota Museum of American Art. Museum Purchase. 99.04.02.03. Courtesy, Minnesota Museum of American Art.

In late August I was lucky to see a show at Indianapolis's Eiteljorg Museum of Indians and Western Art. Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison is now in transit to the Heard Museum in Phoenix, where it opens on October 25. I had not before known of George Morrison and could only marvel how this could be. His work—painting, drawing, wood collage, wood sculpture, lithography—responds across a sixty-year career to the art movements of his time: regionalism, surrealism, cubism, and abstract expressionism. 

Morrison moved in the 40's from Minnesota, where he grew up and studied at the Minnesota School of Art, to New York City, where he attended the Art Students League. He was close with Franz Kline, and he moved in the circle of Kline, de Kooning, Motherwell, Joan Mitchell—the New York School. He was one of them and he showed with them. He had his first solo show in 1948. 

By 1970, when Morrison returned to his home state and a faculty appointment at the University of Minnesota, he had achieved considerable recognition in the forms of purchase prizes and awards. At the University, he was appointed to two faculties: studio art and American Indian studies. 

Morrison was a Chippewa from the Grand Portage Reservation, a fact that had had little presence in either the content, materials, or techniques of his work. In New York, his colleagues had been unaware of his ethnic background, which had not been a preoccupation for him. His interests and goals were the same as the other artists around him. He was not identified as an "Indian" artist until his return to Minnesota, where knowledge of his Chippewa identity created controversies about "who he was" as an artist. Despite his excellence and eminence as a modern artist, there were curators who declined to show him with other Native artists because his art didn't look like Indian art. Morrison was comfortable with his heritage; he was comfortable too with his cosmopolitan point of view.

As he aged, Morrison's Chippewa heritage took a more prominent place in his work. This resulted not from social pressure but from the natural process of his life journey and growing understanding of his own story. In the catalogue that shares the show's name, Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison by W. Jackson Rushing III and Kristin Makholm (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), plates show many works that arise from or include this impulse. They are consonant, though, with his work as cubist, abstract expressionist, and master of materials in traditions that relate him to Picasso more than to traditional Navajo art. Indeed, he faced the prejudice that "Indian" art was usually expected to include the iconography of the southwest tribes. Morrison's work lacked suns. What kind of Indian art was that?

Untitled (Quarry Face), 1949, pencil, pastel, and ink on paper, 18 x 24 in. Minnesota Museum of American Art. Acquisition Fund Purchase. 94.01.11. Courtesy, Minnesota Museum of American Art.

Modern Spirit is alive with beautiful and sophisticated work, much from the collection of the Minnesota Museum of American Art. It's a great pity that Morrison seems, though, to be cramped into the position of regional and Native American artist. He is clearly of the world-class stature he enjoyed when he worked in New York. It's disconcerting to see that when he returned to teach and continue his distinguished work in Minnesota, he was cast as a regional and ethnic artist. The current show toured to New York in 2013, exhibited at the National Museum of the American Indian. Its other stops are (or have been) Fargo, Indianapolis (Museum of Indians and Western Art), Phoenix, and St. Paul at the Minnesota History Center. What about the Whitney? The Smithsonian? The Hunter Museum in Chattanooga? An American art museum? A modern art museum? Evidently the dilemma of identity-based interpretation remains unresolved. He is a major Native American artist and took pride in that. To the extent that ethnic identity ghettoizes his work, it's a loss for many who would appreciate Morrison in all his breadth and would appreciate equally the inclusion of Native American artists as "normal."

 A variety of themes and visual motifs run throughout Morrison's work, from earliest to late. I was particularly attracted to his use of the long landscape with implicit or explicit horizon line. This orientation fascinates me for all the things it can signify and can invoke in feeling. His spider-covered 1949 drawing, Quarry Face, above, is both landscape (distant) and suggests by its title a surface close enough to touch; the "spiders" reinforce this latter idea. 

The boxes created by horizontal and vertical lines, which might create the lapidary effect of a rock wall, seems to intensify the flow of the lines from left to right, where colors change at the borders. Each "box" both contains a truncated landscape view (defined by color) and extends it by line to connect with its neighbor. The several white circles with differently defined edges read like moons over different prospects. They further complicate not the landscape, but the multiplicity of stratified landscapes layered across the drawing. 

Is it landscape? It's length compared to height makes it technically so. It's an abstract drawing. Is it more? The connected sinuous line that directs itself upward from left to right in the top quadrant forms a horizon, cutting across the entire plane.

Untitled, 1978, lithograph, 30 x 44 1/2 in. Collection Minnesota Museum of American Art. Gift of Northwestern National Bank of Minneapolis. 79.42.14. Courtesy, Minnesota Museum of American Art.

Morrison's 1978 monochromatic lithograph shows some of the same features of the1949 color drawing. One of Morrison's techniques was to make large, long collages of wood. This is a print pulled from such a collage. Like the earlier drawing, there is the tension between close and far away: We might place our hands directly on this surface; perhaps it's a wall that blocks our movement. Or we might be observing an abstract, two-dimensional representation of a faraway space. Again, three-quarters of the way up, Morrison has placed a line that divides the image horizontally. It sits like a high horizon line, suggesting that we consider Above and Below as spaces with different significances.

Morning Storm, Red Rock Variation: Lake Superior Landscape, 1986, acrylic on canvas board, 6 x 11 in. Collection Minnesota Museum of American Art. Acquisition Fund Purchase.  87.17.2. Courtesy, Minnesota Museum of American Art.

Morrison's connection to the landscape of his childhood on the Lake Superior shoreline becomes literal in the horizontal paintings and pastels of his artistically fertile 70s. While the horizon where water and land, or water and sky meet are a constant subject, the energetic and fully engaged explorations of color, materials, and form are of no less interest than the spiritual content. In Morning Storm, Red Rock Variation, above, again he makes us debate about the represented space, giving this miniature, high-surfaced painting the feel of a colossal work. The blocks of color in the bottom section could, as in the others we've seen, be stones in a wall—tactile, immediate, and topped by an edge, until the merging ideas of edge and horizon soften into ambiguity.

Awakening, Time Edge Rising, Red Rock Variation: Lake Superior Landscape, 1990, acrylic and pastel on paper, 22 3/8 x 30 in. Collection Minnesota Museum of American Art. Museum Purchase. 99.04.02.01. Courtesy of Minnesota Museum of American Art.

Both Awakening, above, and Spirit Path, New Day, which opens this article, were accomplished when Morrison was 71, with another ten years ahead of him. These acrylic and pastel paintings are more impressionistic now than expressionistic. His distribution of color in patches seems to describe the experience of something real, something with stunning sensory impact. These colors are reminiscent of Monet, so there's that art historical connection.

Monet was an explorer of natural light: he did not invent colors, but worked to record what he saw. Using a similar palette, did Morrison do the same? Did he record what he saw at dawn on Lake Superior in different atmospheric conditions? I tend to doubt that that was all there was to it, for what it seems that Morrison recorded throughout his career-long, multi-media work in landscape form was always abstract. He seems not to have been interested in pictorial landscape. Rather, he appears to have been concerned with artistic form and with what one associates with it or embeds in the form. His later landscapes—the ones that are acknowledged as such—are visions really of water and sky, but of water that generates fire, of flaming spirit that unifies heaven and earth. The work is intensely visionary, and those visions may have their roots in the painter's ties to the earth of a Chippewa reservation on Lake Superior and to traditional cultural ideas of the ascendent soul and its powers.

It could be. Perhaps not. Morrison was a Native American and a phenomenal artist. These landscapes seem to be directly linked to places and inspiration from his Native heritage. Morrison was also an American artist of the New York School. His work is linked to significant strands of modern, Western art. In Modern Spirit we see the work of an artist who negotiated the scene—simultaneously present and far away—through his own integrative cultural experience: only his own.