Oral history interview with Jack Whitten
odd: label: General
content: Originally recorded on 7 memory cards. Reformatted in 2010 as 7 digital wav files. Duration is 6 hr., 25 min.
name: label: Interviewee
content: Whitten, Jack, 1939-2018
label: Interviewer
content: Richards, Judith Olch
topic: label: Occupation
content: Painters -- New York (State)
label: Topic
content: African American artists
label: Topic
content: HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities)
acqinfo: label: Provenance
content: This interview is part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and administrators.
creator: label: Interviewee
content: Whitten, Jack, 1939-2018
label: Interviewer
content: Richards, Judith Olch
bioghist: label: Biographical / Historical
content: Interviewee Jack Whitten (1939-2018) was an American abstract painter in Woodside, N.Y. Interviewer Judith Olch Richards (1947- ) is former Executive director of iCI in New York, N.Y.
physdesc: label: Extent
content: 130 Pages (Transcript)
unitdate: label: Date
content: 2009 December 1-3
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: Archives of American Art
identifier: label: Identifier
content: AAA.whitte09
objectType: label: Type
content: Collection descriptions
label: Type
content: Archival materials
label: Type
content: Pages
label: Type
content: Sound recordings
label: Type
content: Interviews
genre_format: label: Genre/Form
content: Sound recordings
label: Genre/Form
content: Interviews
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: An interview of Jack Whitten conducted 2009 December 1 and 3, by Judith Olch Richards, for the Archives of American Art, at Whitten's studio, in Woodside, N.Y.
label: Scope and Contents
content: Whitten speaks of his childhood in Bessemer, Alabama; being an African-American in the segregated South; his time at the Tuskegee Institute and Southern University; his participation in a civil rights march; the influence of jazz; his time at Cooper Union in New York, the abstract expressionists of New York including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Phillip Guston; his teaching at Cooper Union and School of Visual Arts; his 9/11 experience and the memorial that it led him to create; how his work varies between his summers in Greece and his studio time in New York; movement of his work from figurative expressionism to process painting and experimentation and how it fits between form and meaning; the concepts of horizontality, non-relational abstraction, and third-wave modernism; the galleries of the Horodner Romley, Daniel Weinberg, Alexander Grey, Thomas Flor, and other spaces; Whitten also recalls Leo Amino, Bob Blackburn, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Wayne Theibaud, Bob Thompson and others.