9.11.01

2006, acrylic and mixed media on canvas which include ash and molten materials from the World Trade Center site; and bone fragments and blood from a butcher.

Jack Whitten, 1939-2018, American.  Baltimore Art Museum

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Bessemer, Alabama, the artist moved to New York in 1960 as a student after violent confrontation at a Civil Rights march.

He began painting in the early 1960s, aligning himself with the Abstract Expressionists then still dominant. 

The artist abandoned brushes by the early 1970s.

Instead, Whitten moved to experimenting with process:  using acrylic paint, he poured, levelled, scraped, raked, impressed and incised it with various tools which he made or improvised.

In the early 1980s, he began building his paintings much as he built his sculptures and referred thereafter to ‘making’ his paintings as he made his sculptures. 

This is how this creation was made. It took 5 years. He completed no other work during this time.

After his marriage to a Greek-American, the artist spent his summers in a village on Crete. There he sculpted.

Whitten’s move to a syncretic appreciation of art had long since begun:  New York;  African art as he knew it from museum collections, classical Greek art, modern Mediterranean art and the tradition of Western art.

In 1987, Jack Whitten began making the series he called Black Monoliths to memorialize excellence in the black arts, politics, sports. He made 11 of these.

 

On 9/11/2001, the artist was at his studio in lower Manhattan and witnessed the immediate aftermath  of the attack on the Twin Towers. 

 

It is interesting to note that this pyramid is also a black monolith.

 

It was never so named because it has nothing to do with the excellence of  Black artists, sportsmen, or the courage of their political leaders. 

Jack Whitten left to individual interpretation why he depicted the destruction of 9/11/2001 with a central black pyramid. 

It has been said that the pyramid is taken from the  US dollar bill.

The commonest interpretation is that the pyramid is a memorial to the dead. Other interpretations reflect conspiracy theories about the origin and reason for this attack on the Twin Towers.

 

9.11.01

2006, acrylic and mixed media on canvas which include ash and molten materials from the World Trade Center site; and bone fragments and blood from a butcher.

Jack Whitten, 1939-2018, American.  Baltimore Art Museum