At MoMA: Jack Whitten, Dead Reckoning I and Khee I

This acute cognizance of the color line manifested beyond the artist’s activism. In 1970, Whitten, informed by Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism, embarked on an extensive investigation into the possibilities of paint as data, the foundation of which was a fundamental interest in light and energy. To do this, he removed color. Black and white remained. While also a practice in formalism, this absence of other colors was engendered by Whitten’s considerations of Black and white in the United States and a personal philosophy to eschew binaries. He instead believed in the limitless possibilities of a third entity: gray. Two works from the artist’s exploration into such expansion, Khee I (1978) and Dead Reckoning I (1980), both in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s collection, are on view at the Museum of Modern Art this spring in Jack Whitten: The Messenger, the artist’s first comprehensive retrospective.

Khee I is just one of many black, white, and “neither/nor” paintings that make up Whitten’s “Greek Alphabet” series. To make these works, Whitten would place items—“disruptors,” as he termed them—such as wires or cables beneath a canvas; apply layers of gesso, pigment, and acrylic slip on the canvas surface; and then swiftly pull a notched tool—what he called “developers,” handmade from altered rakes, saws, or Afro combs—over the work. While the artist’s brisk method was determined by acrylic’s fast-drying qualities, it simultaneously served as a mechanism to document and make visible the work’s “data,” or the characteristics of its material. In Khee I, an otherworldly image emerges from this process. Parallel lines of incised paint, coupled with the contoured impressions of the disruptors, appear like the stuff of microscopic inspections. Irregularities in the work’s composition occur not out of a lack of precision or fabrication but as a natural occurrence.

Within grooves, colors glimmer. Yellows, reds, and blues. An illusion that Whitten somehow makes possible despite the fact that these colors have no material presence in the work.

Two years later, Whitten completed Dead Reckoning I. Here, Whitten accentuated geometry, using the same methods as his engraved paintings. A swath of black paint is interrupted by concentric circles of varying density, which are bisected by dashed and solid horizontal, vertical, and diagonal yellow, orange, and pink lines carved into a thick layer of acrylic paint. Color returns in the background of the composition in faint flickers behind sheer layers of dark pigment, resembling the onset or aftermath of an aurora captured through a telescope lens.

Whitten dubbed the paintings from this decade “Energy Fields,” expansive fields of force that trap bits and pieces of light, as Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell writes.1 These Energy Fields endured throughout the rest of Whitten’s career, where his paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and tesserae amount to more than just static objects. Instead, the works buzz, vibrate, and glisten, like light and energy conjured.

See Khee I and Dead Reckoning I, alongside nearly two hundred other paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by Whitten in Jack Whitten: The Messenger, on view at the Museum of Modern Art from March 23 to August 2, 2025.