• Join Puck

    Directly Supporting Authors

    A new economic model in which writers are also partners in the business.

    Personalized Subscriptions

    Customize your settings to receive the newsletters you want from the authors you follow.

    Stay in the Know

    Connect directly with Puck talent through email and exclusive events.

  • What is puck? Newsletters Authors Podcasts Events Gift Puck Careers

You Don’t Know Jack

As the Trump administration attacks D.E.I., a slew of museum exhibits showcasing African American art is culminating with major mid-career and historical retrospectives opening this spring. The Museum of Modern Art’s Jack Whitten survey is the surprise standout, and reveals deeper insights into the dilemmas of being a Black artist.

Jack Whitten
Jack Whitten's pieces, seen at his MoMA retrospective, seem to have prefigured—or simply arrived at earlier—strategies for creating abstract work that we would later see in the art of many other more famous and familiar artists. Photo: Courtesy of the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth
Marion Maneker
March 30, 2025

I went to see the Jack Whitten retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art out of a sense of obligation. Of course, I had heard of Whitten as an influential and important African American artist, but he was not one that I knew much about. And the work I had seen, like the show at Hauser & Wirth last fall in London, highlighting his ’70s era black-and-white process paintings, was too subtle and subdued for me to be able to appreciate prima facie. I needed more context and background to understand what I was seeing.