Tiffany Hanssen: In 1959, a young man named Jack Whitten was studying pre-med at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute when suddenly he changed his life forever. He decided to drop out, become an artist, and move to New York to pursue his dream. For the rest of us, it's a good thing that he made that choice because the Museum of Modern Art has just opened a new major retrospective of Jack Whitten's work. Whitten died in 2018 at the age of 78, but he left behind over 50 years of abstract, experimental, improvisational, and highly technical paintings.

His work earned him a Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2015. Whitten was inspired by jazz, the cosmos, Black leaders, the civil rights movement. He dedicated years to the material of the paint itself. He was fascinated by finding new ways to mix and manipulate acrylics, fascinated by the process of making art. The MoMA retrospective is called Jack Whitten: The Messenger. It opened earlier this week and is on view through August 2nd. You can see a sample of some of the paintings in the show on our Instagram story right now @allofitwnyc. We have in studio with us Mirsini Amidon, who is Jack's daughter and archival steward. Welcome, Mirsini.

Mirsini Amidon: Thank you.

Tiffany Hanssen: Also Michelle Kuo, who's the lead MoMA director of this exhibition. Welcome.

Michelle Kuo: Thank you.

Tiffany Hanssen: Let's talk about this transition that I mentioned from pre-med student to artist. One, I'm wondering, Mirsini, did he talk much about that decision and that transition? Two, as a mother, I can imagine being like, "Wait, what? You're going to do what?" Again, we're very glad he did it, and also I can imagine it was a really big earth shattering decision.

Mirsini Amidon: Well, my father describes it as basically like being struck by a bolt of lightning. He was in ROTC class, Air Force, he was studying to become a pre-med doctor, and something moved him to get up right in the middle of the class and just say out loud, "What am I doing here? What am I doing here?"

Tiffany Hanssen: Saying out loud what some of us often just think, right?

Michelle Kuo: Yes. He got himself away from Tuskegee and he went to Southern University and he studied art. Then, he was getting very much involved with the civil rights movement at that time. He had helped organize a march which basically changed the direction of his life because people were throwing shit at these students who were just protesting they want to be treated like grown ups, like humans. My father just said, "You know what? I have to leave the South. I will either be killed or I will kill someone."

A teacher of his told him about Cooper Union, "You can go to New York City. You can get into art school for free if you pass the test." My dad got on a Greyhound bus after throwing all of his possessions into a big lake, and he got on a Greyhound bus, he came to New York, he took the test for Cooper, he got in, and he went to night school. His entire world opened up. For the first time in his entire life, he was in a classroom with white people and he was surrounded by artists and by art and by museums, and he loved going to MoMA.

Tiffany Hanssen: We're talking about a MoMA retrospective called Jack Whitten: The Messenger. It opened earlier this week. We have in studio with us Mirsini Amidon, who is Jack's daughter and archival steward, and we also have Michelle Kuo, who's the lead MoMA curator of this exhibition. Michelle, let's talk a little bit about his childhood, which, backing up from this Tuskegee moment of revelation into his childhood, he grew up in the Jim Crow south in Alabama. He's the son of a seamstress and a coal miner.

He referred later to Jim Crow as American apartheid. I'm wondering how we see those views and his childhood represented in his work.

Michelle Kuo: Jack Whitten had these extraordinary sensory experiences as a child in the south, one of which was going to the steel mills and the iron ore quarries and coal mines. Because of racial segregation, he and his fellow classmates could not visit museums, but instead, his teachers took them on tours of these steel mills and mines and quarries. In the show at MoMA, you're going to see incredible, luminous paintings that remind you of hot-rolled iron, corten steel, of minerals, of quarries, of these kinds of very dense, sometimes even crystalline materials.

Tiffany Hanssen: What age was he taken into those tour toured-- toured those facilities?

Michelle Kuo: I think when he was in grade school. His father also was a coal miner as well.

Tiffany Hanssen: It's astonishing, isn't it, Mirsini, that that can have such a-- I mean, not to lean too heavily on the mining aspect of this with the hot ore thing, but such a searing effect on him as a child that we see it so much later in his work. How does it make you feel to see those periods of his life represented in his work?

Mirsini Amidon: I did not grow up with those paintings because they were made when I was two years old, four years old, but for me, it's my dad's youth. It's the representation of his family, of our family. It's the south put into a painting.

Tiffany Hanssen: What did he talk about when he talked-- Did he talk to you about that, growing up in Alabama, what it was like?

Mirsini Amidon: He tried not to. He was not someone who talked too much about the past. He was always looking more towards the future, towards optimism, towards hope. When he would talk about the past, he would talk about his neighbors. He had all these weird neighbors. My mother always was convinced that he was making up stories, but apparently there really were these two sisters who lived next door, and they had a terrible fight. One sister brained the other one with a glass bottle and then sewed up her forehead. That's actually a true story.

The south in Alabama is filled with crazy and gothic and horror, but it's also filled with community and tightness and the church, which kept everyone together. He would talk about how important community is, and he kept that feeling all the way through his life. It was always important to have community.

Tiffany Hanssen: When he became an artist, he became very involved in the civil rights movement. Was he always an activist at his core?

Mirsini Amidon: Yes, absolutely. I don't think that you can grow up at that time and not have a burning desire to see change and to be part of that change. He was making posters in high school. He was organizing marches and different things, end even in high school-- [crosstalk]

Tiffany Hanssen: He demonstrated.

Mirsini Amidon: He demonstrated then and all the way through. You had to do it, because how else could we survive as Black people? You get to a breaking point.

Tiffany Hanssen: We. One of the ways we see that in his work, Michelle, is in his portrayal of Black leaders, right? Tell us about that and who we might see in the exhibit.

Michelle Kuo: Well, it's a great question, because, in fact, you may not see any of their faces or likenesses. Jack Whitten was an abstract artist, which means that he creates paintings and sculptures and drawings that are really almost prompting a change in your perception. It might be dazzling colors or scintillating lights or incredible surfaces and materials, but they're not exactly depicting a person, even though they're dedicated to them. Jack Witten always said, actually, for example, Miles Davis is in the paint, he's in there, and he saw his works as embodying his subjects rather than-- [crosstalk]

Tiffany Hanssen: Talk about that work specifically, about the Miles Davis work.

Michelle Kuo: It's a gorgeous painting in black and white called Homecoming for Miles. It's made of this incredible process that Witten invented. He invented many new techniques of art making in his lifetime. This particular one, he dried and hardened slabs or sheets of acrylic paint and then sliced them into tiles, like mosaic tiles, and then recombined them as if it's like the most complicated multidimensional puzzle you've ever seen into a kind of galactic sweep of black and white. It looks like stars, but it also looks like a kind of cosmic net, is what he called it.

Tiffany Hanssen: That's an amazing phrase. Mirsini, I'm wondering, did he feel a certain responsibility to honor these people through his work?

Mirsini Amidon: Absolutely, because he wanted to honor not only his friends. One of the pieces in the show is for Bobby Short. My father considers many paintings that aren't necessarily called black monoliths, but they still are. They're ways of honoring-- [crosstalk]

Tiffany Hanssen: Tell us what we mean when we're talking about black monoliths for folks who don't know.

Mirsini Amidon: Okay, so a black monolith is someone who has done good in the black community that we can look up to. This is someone that we can respect that has made a huge impact-

Tiffany Hanssen: Ralph Ellison.

Mirsini Amidon: - in Black life-- [crosstalk] Ralph Ellison. Maya Angelou.

Tiffany Hanssen: Muhammad Ali.

Mirsini Amidon: Oh, of course, Muhammad Ali. [laughs] Amiri Baraka. It felt very, very important to him that you honor these people in the best way that he knew how, which was to put them into the paint, put their spirit into the painting. When you look at the painting, you almost get a vibration of this person.

Tiffany Hanssen: One of his works that I love, and I know, Michelle, you said we're not going to see a portrait in the way that a lot of people think about a portrait, like, here's somebody's face that we can look at, but speaking of Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man, it looks like an outline of a human being. I mean, the play on The Invisible Man and all, it's just astounding to me. It's absolutely one of my favorites. I just want you to talk about it.

Michelle Kuo: There is this figure, silhouette that's ghost-like, but it also looks a bit like a slice of bread in profile. Witten was looking at all of these things. Embedded into that painting, there's this shape of a head, but also it's made with those mosaic tiles of acrylic paint that he's dried and hardened, but almost uses like amber. Embedded in that painting are eggshells, rust, molasses, even a small razor blade.

Tiffany Hanssen: Okay, I just have to talk from an archivist's point of view, how are you saving something like eggshells for the next generations to view? I can imagine, I don't know, as an art archivist, that there are people who are hand wringing over that.

Michelle Kuo: They're embedded in this acrylic medium, so in a way,-

Mirsini Amidon: So kind of frozen.

Michelle Kuo: - they're preserved just like artifacts would be preserved in amber.

Mirsini Amidon: Yes. Think of insects in amber. It's exactly like that. The eggshell isn't sticking out of the tile. It's completely encased within this acrylic paint.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, and how silly of me to think that he wouldn't have thought of that.

Mirsini Amidon: Well, my mother is a paper conservator, so [laughs] we care intensely.

Michelle Kuo: She had an dvantage. She had an advantage.

[laughter]

Tiffany Hanssen: I'm sure there were opinions that were given on that issue.

Mirsini Amidon: Always.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes. I've read in The Times that few artists are as closely associated with Lower Manhattan. We are in Lower Manhattan, for people listening, may not know where our studios are. We are in Lower Manhattan right now. Few people as closely associated with Lower Manhattan as Jack Whitten. I'm going to put the question to both of you. We'll start with you, Mirsini. Why? For someone listening on the far flung reaches of the planet who might not know, what is it about him that is so imbued in this area?

Mirsini Amidon: Well, one of his first studio spaces was on the Lower East Side. Then, he heard about Soho and Tribeca, which at the time had gorgeous light, gorgeous big spaces that artists could go to that were affordable, and we never left. We came and we never left. I grew up on Lisbonard street, which is only two blocks long. It's a little cobblestone street. When I was a child, it was very, very, very, very quiet, which my dad needed for his work, for his studio. He loved it. He always loved it. He loved that there were other artists, so again, community.

There were people that everyone would go to each other's studios. Everyone would go to the shows and meet up with their friends and have Chinese food afterwards. It was a tight-knit community of a lot of artists, none of us who had any money.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes. Talk to us about his studio.

Mirsini Amidon: The studio was like in Aladdin's cave. It was my favorite place to be as a child. It was and still is filled with paint, filled with these sparkly, iridescent-- [crosstalk]

Tiffany Hanssen: Were you allowed to touch things?

Mirsini Amidon: I was always allowed to touch things. It's quite difficult now to go to a gallery or a museum space and I'm not allowed to touch. It's horrifying. [laughs]

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes. The preservation of that space as it was is important to, Michel, understand his process. He was a process artist, right?

Michelle Kuo: Yes. I mean,-- [crosstalk]

Tiffany Hanssen: Explain what that means.

Michelle Kuo: Every artist is a process artist in some way, but Jack Whitten might be the process artist. I really know of no other artist in art history of the modern times that invented so many different kinds of processes and techniques and signature styles. He didn't just have one look. He had maybe like 10 or 15. When you go to his studio now, as it's been preserved, there are incredible-- It's like an alchemist lab.

It's got many different kinds of pigments, all those weird materials we just talked about, like eggshells and other kinds of phosphorescent gels or chemicals that he would add to the acrylic paint to make it dry slower or faster or more viscous or more liquid. He's really doing all of these experiments to try and create what I can only describe as completely alchemical works that you just don't understand how he even really made them. We've done this really fantast first technical study of his materials and artworks through MoMA's Conservation Lab.

They've analyzed all of these different things that he was using, but at the same time, there's always a bit of mystery when you look at his work. How did he really do that?

Tiffany Hanssen: Give us another example of something we're going to see in the show where we're going to walk up and go, "How in the heck did he do that," with whatever paint and materials and mystical, magical fairy dust.

Michelle Kuo: Fairy dust.

Tiffany Hanssen: What should someone just walk in and walk right to, if that's what they're looking for?

Michelle Kuo: I think that one of the most incredible works is a painting called Pink Psyche Queen, and it's from 1973. It's incredible because it looks like a pink river in motion or a photographic blur of something that's moving at terrific speed, but it also almost looked like lava coursing across. He did this by creating many, many different layers of differently colored acrylic paint on his studio floor, so working horizontally instead of vertically, as an artist normally does.

Then, he would make all these layers with different drying times, and then at the end, he invented a big wooden tool that he called the developer-

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes, I have notes on this

Michelle Kuo: - in reference to photography. He raked across that big wooden tool a final stroke, and he "developed" the image. The thing is, if all of those layers of paint were wet, you would just see kind of a big soup. Instead, you see this almost elastic tearing of the surfaces of acrylic, so many layers, as if in motion, rushing by you.

Tiffany Hanssen: Is this tool in the show?

Michelle Kuo: It is.

Tiffany Hanssen: Okay, so describe for us what it-- I have no idea. It's a wooden--

Michelle Kuo: It looks like a big wooden T frame. At the edge is a large metal edge, like imagine the edge of a rake, but he could attach different materials to it, like neoprene, rubber, or a serrated edge so that when he combed or raked across a big painting on the floor, he would change the whole structure of the paint to create that final image.

Tiffany Hanssen: Got it. Some of these paintings are, to your point, Michel, very, very big. Mirsini, what is it that he liked about working in size?

Mirsini Amidon: Because he could.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes, I mean, I was going to try to make some sort of grand-- and maybe it doesn't exist, about taking up space.

Mirsini Amidon: Well, when you're told all your life that you can't take up space and now you have the freedom to do it--

Tiffany Hanssen: I'm going to pull out this-- [crosstalk]

Mirsini Amidon: I'm going to be the biggest I can. I'm going to go the fastest I can. He also made very, very, very small, very powerful paintings, which, when you see photographed, you can't tell how large the painting is.

Michelle Kuo: He makes these mosaics, in fact, each little mosaic tile is sometimes a world unto itself. It's like a miniature painting with thousands of others constellated together.

Tiffany Hanssen: You mentioned, Mirsini, that you guys didn't have a lot of money growing up.

Mirsini Amidon: Nope.

Tiffany Hanssen: Paint is expensive-

Mirsini Amidon: Paint is expensive.

Tiffany Hanssen: - not to state the obvious. Talk to us about how he-- because there are some creative ways that he went about fulfilling his need for more and more paint and paint that he needed to do what he was so compelled to do.

Mirsini Amidon: Well, he was very lucky because there was a man who owned a paint company named Lennie Bocour. My dad would call him Uncle Lennie, and he would write to Uncle Lennie and say, "I need paint." You would trade paint for a painting. Lennie would send over paint, my dad would use it in these gorgeous, gigantic paintings that took a lot of paint, and then Lennie would end up with a painting.

Michelle Kuo: You have to remember, this is a moment when acrylic paint is relatively new. Artists like Whitten are-- [crosstalk]

Tiffany Hanssen: We're talking '70s here, right?

Michelle Kuo: Yes.

Mirsini Amidon: Yes.

Tiffany Hanssen: Okay.

Michelle Kuo: Experimenting with this all the time.

Mirsini Amidon: Yes. Which helps Lennie Bocour because he's finding out what the properties of the paint that he creates--

Tiffany Hanssen: Sure.

Mirsini Amidon: What the Property is. I mean, no one really knows. What can you do with this amazing, amazing material? I think it was a lot of fun for artists at that time to have this material that's very stable and you can do whatever you want with it.

Tiffany Hanssen: The '70s were sort of a turning point for him, Michelle. Artistically, we see a transformation in his work. If we're looking strictly at it from a timeline, from A to B, how will people see the evolution of his work from and to and in and out of abstract expressionism, whatever he was doing? Where are those mile markers for him?

Michelle Kuo: It's pretty uncanny because what I learned was that it's almost like clockwork at the start of every decade. 1970, 1980, 1990, it's like Jack Whitten wakes up and says, "I'm going to do something totally new." There's this very interesting decade-by-decade chronology there. He really does completely transform at the beginning of each of those years. I think the '70s is interesting because often still, when we think about contemporary art, the '70s kind of gets lost in the mix between the '60s and the '80s, and for Jack Whitten, it's an absolutely crucial time.

To be committed to painting, when actually many other artists were leaving painting behind, speaks of an incredible dedication to that medium and to the exploration that he was making.

Tiffany Hanssen: I know this isn't on topic, and going to what?

Michelle Kuo: Going to, let's say,

Tiffany Hanssen: To photography.

Michelle Kuo: - photography or performance or all of these new ways of making art. In fact, Jack Whitten was exploring all of those aspects of new art as well. It's just that he ended up putting it back into the paint.

Tiffany Hanssen: Mirsini, did he talk about those artistic changes or was it just more of a like, you know what, today I'm doing this?

Mirsini Amidon: My father talked non-stop about his art and about painting. Every day around the dinner table, he'd talk about what painting he was working on, if it was pushing back on him, if it was causing problems, if things were going well in the studio or not. I guess it was a constant conversation.

Michelle Kuo: He writes about it all the time as well in a daily studio log or [inaudible 00:23:19], and some of those pages are in the show and in the book. He will write things like an entry that says, "I am 40 years old today. I'm broke, I'm sick, but do you think I'm not happy? No. I'm an artist. I'm supposed to confront these challenges. I have my family, I have my art, I love my life--" [crosstalk]

Tiffany Hanssen: It's like a diary.

Michelle Kuo: It's like a diary, and it shows him working through all of these problems and struggles and challenges, but also these amazing breakthroughs.

Tiffany Hanssen: Let's talk about the influence of jazz a little bit. First of all, Michelle, you mentioned Miles Davis. He has another one, Art Blakey. How do we see jazz in his work?

Michelle Kuo: Jazz is completely fundamental. He himself played the tenor saxophone. His brother was a jazz musician. When he gets to New York City, he starts going to all the clubs, seeing all the shows, and meeting musicians. For example, John Coltrane, as the legend goes, Jack Whitten ran after him one day after a show and said, "Explain to me your music," and John Coltrane says to Whitten, it's like a wave and that he creates sheets of sound.

Jack Whitten turns around and said, "You know what? I want to make sheets of light." There's an incredible work in the show called Light Sheet One that is this kind of abstract pouring forth of waves that you see. Whitten was totally inspired by jazz, the sonic and the visual melding together, but also the idea of improvisation and experimentation in real time, that the experiment itself is the performance. The play is the performance.

Tiffany Hanssen: Right. Michelle, I know we can't tell people what to take from this exhibition, this retrospective. Mirsini, as his daughter, what would you hope someone would take? What would you ask that someone try to take with them?

Mirsini Amidon: I ask them to come in, and you can come in on many different levels. You can come in a person off the street, knowing nothing, and go, "Wow, those are some really pretty pictures. Those are really pretty colors. Wow, that's really a glowing pink. That's an orange," and that's fine. Take that. You can also come in and go, "Wow, is this man into science fiction?" Which he was. He adored Star Trek. You can look at the titles and go, "What's this title about? What's this have to do with Miles Davis?

Tiffany Hanssen: Curiosity.

Mirsini Amidon: Just lots of curiosity. Come in with an open mind.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes. Okay, Michelle, last plug. This runs through?

Michelle Kuo: August 2nd.

Tiffany Hanssen: Okay. We've been talking about a new exhibition called Jack Whitten: The Messenger. It is on view at MoMA right now through, as Michelle said, August 2nd. We've been talking with Jack's daughter, Mirsini Amidon, and with the curator, Michelle Kuo. Thank you so much for your time.

Mirsini Amidon: Thank you.

Michelle Kuo: Thank you.