P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

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2007 Summer

Jack Whitten: A Loud Noise Above

Conversation between P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Phong Bui and Jack Whitten

Jack Whitten

9.11.01

2005

Mixed media and acrylic on canvas
120 x 240"

Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY

Phong Bui: Let’s talk about your early history in Alabama, particularly in the years leading to the Civil Rights Movement…

Jack Whitten: My first introduction to painting was through art classes that I took with John. B. Hall at Dunbar High School in Bessemer, Alabama. Later, while I was a Pre-med student and an ROTC Air Force cadet at Tuskegee Institute, I was fortu­nate enough to have met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, who was an inspi­ration to me. By this time, I realized that I was meant to be an artist so I went to study art at Southern University in Baton Rouge. While I was there, I participated in a major civil rights protest march through Baton Rouge to the State Capital, which forced the whole university to close down. The spirit of this march was so horrific that I decided to come to New York to further my study at Cooper Union, and I received my BFA there in 1964.

PB: Did the Figurative Expression­ist scene that emerged out of Willem de Kooning’s Women Series of the mid 1950s have any impact on your work at the time?

JW: Yes, it did. My meetings with de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnet Newman, and Philip Guston, along with Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Jacob Lawrence were all equally important in terms of coming to grasp with my own synthesis as a painter. At the same time, friends of mine such as Bob Thompson, Emilio Cruz, Joe Over­street, the few black artists of my genera­tion, had a similar interest in painting but my subject matter was directed towards identity and political is­sues. Needless to say, the assassinations of Dr. King, the Kenne­dys, and Malcolm X, the Civil Rights Move­ment, as well as the war in Vietnam all had a profound and emotional impact on my work during those years.

PB: Is there a coherent continuity from those paintings to your recent monumental work 9.11.01?

JW: When I moved to Lispenard street in 1962, I saw the first bulldozer that started the foundation of the Twin Towers and so I witnessed the whole process of construction. Then, on the morning of Sep­tember 11th, 2001, I was in the street with firemen who came to inspect a gas leak in the neighborhood. We heard a loud noise above. We all looked up and saw the first plane hitting the North Tower, then sub­sequently the South Tower, which went down first. In fact, the young man who was standing next to me was the one who made the first video of the whole sequence, which later showed on TV. You probably re­member hearing someone shouting “Holy Shit!”—that’s my voice. In retrospect, the paintings from the 60s and 9.11.01 share the similar expression of violence and po­litical angst. The only difference is that the latter took me a whole entire year, between 2005 to 2006, to paint.

PB: How was the painting made materi­ally?

JW: For the past 40 years, I have been experimenting with how to take matter and instill it with subject matter. The 9.11.01 painting contains a various mix of different materials: silica, crushed bone, blood, ure­thane, mica, rust, and ash. Then I needed something to build the impression of what I first saw when the plane hit the building. Before you saw the smoke and flames, the sky was filled like a chandelier of broken glass—so crushed Mylar was able to give me the equivalent crystallization.

PB: What was the source for the pyra­mid shape?

JW: It’s from the back of the U.S. Dol­lar, which for me symbolizes money, oil, and blood—the three elements that cannot be excluded in any discussion of 9/11.