Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed

A classic collection of Whitten’s writings and process notes, updated to include additional transcriptions and a new afterword

A Black man who grew up in the Jim Crow South, Jack Whitten arrived in New York in 1959 and began a wide-ranging exploration into the nature of painting and artmaking that would sustain more than five decades of work. Early in his career, in 1970, Whitten experienced his breakthrough moment: when he lifted a thick slab of paint off its support, he realized he could experiment within the physical, dimensional space of the paint itself. Approaching abstraction as scientist and mystic, Whitten probed the expressive and material possibilities of painting. He constantly changed styles, developed new methods and took up new subject matter, but it is precisely this spirit of curious inquiry that unites his relentlessly experimental career.
Notes from the Woodshed collects the artist's notes from his work in the studio alongside selected interviews and texts. Edited by Katy Siegel, one of Whitten's long-standing champions, this volume offers an intimate look at the artist in his element: the studio. Now in its second edition, this publication is the definitive resource on Whitten’s writings, presenting a fully transcribed collection of the artist’s handwritten logs. Selections from these writings are illustrated with facsimiles of the originals, giving us a feel for the studio and for Whitten’s hand, animating his remarkable line of thought. This edition also features a new afterword in the form of a conversation on Whitten between curators Matilde Guidelli-Guidi and Zoé Whitley and artist Glenn Ligon that sketches out the different forms a deep engagement with his writings might take.

Jack Whitten (1939–2018) was born in Bessemer, Alabama, and studied at the Cooper Union in New York. The Whitney mounted a solo exhibition of his paintings in 1974; in 1983 the Studio Museum in Harlem held a 10-year retrospective. In 2014, a retrospective exhibition was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2015 and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2015 and 2016. Whitten lived in Queens, New York, until his death.