Jack Whitten

For Whitten, meaning was embedded in matter itself. He described soul as a ‘molecular’ force of thought and feeling that preceded culture and ideology. This force was itself a source of wonder—or, as the title of the exhibition suggests, numinosity. Likening light in his paintings to John Coltrane’s use of sound, Whitten believed that, like jazz, ‘painting elicits the presence of the soul.’ ‘Soulspace’ was therefore not only a metaphor. It was a proposition that painting could make the invisible perceptible.

By 1985, Whitten had begun pressing wire mesh netting into wet acrylic, creating pixel-like grids of individually colored squares that anticipate his later tesserae works. He also began casting acrylic reliefs from urban surfaces—manhole covers, tire treads, metal screens and city walls—to produce the Site paintings. Rather than depicting a specific place, these works register the city’s physical imprint, creating a topographical space that exists between representation and abstraction. For Whitten, ‘Site’ referred less to a location than to a state of mind. He connected it to an atopic condition, from the Greek meaning ‘without place,’ that reflected broader questions of Black identity and belonging beyond fixed geography.

On view in the exhibition, more than a dozen Site works on paper, created through a range of experimental processes and material interventions, evidence the expansion of Whitten’s inquiry into surface and index. In such works as ‘Site #3’ and ‘Site #4,’ the direct transfer of texture onto delicate Japanese paper left little room for revision, making chance and irreversibility part of the act of making.

By the end of the decade, Whitten turned these material and spiritual concerns toward commemoration. He began what would become the most sustained series of his career: monumental tributes to luminaries of Black cultural and intellectual life. Works such as ‘Spiral: A Dedication to R. Bearden’ (1988) exemplify this impulse and foreshadow his landmark Black Monolith series, which translates remembrance into layered reliefs and swirling topographies.

At a moment when critics declared the death of painting, Whitten expanded what the medium could do. ‘The Numinous’ brings renewed focus to the extraordinary works he made in the 1980s, repositioning this period as a crucial chapter in his practice––one in which his investigations into material, spirit and abstraction coalesced into one of the most original bodies of work in postwar American art.