My review of the Jack Whitten exhibition at the Met Breuer is up on Burnaway Magazine:
As is recounted in the epic Homeric poem, it took the Greek hero Odysseus ten wandering years to return home to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War. The exhibition “Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2017,” on view at the Met Breuer in New York through December 2, similarly presents the artist’s life as a personal voyage and widely cosmopolitan journey. Born in 1939 in Bessemer, Alabama, (famously known as the home of self-taught artists including Thornton Dial, Ronald Lockett, and Lonnie Holley), Whitten became a civil rights activist as a young Black man growing up in the segregated South. Until his death at the beginning of this year, he lived in New York City and regularly spent time in Greece. “Odyssey” brings together forty of Whitten’s sculptures—which have never been assembled in such a large number and presented publicly—deftly merging associations with African American history, African sculpture, and Greek mythology. Whitten is known as New York-based artist who brought politics and history into conversation with abstract painting, but here it is his deeply personal wood carving practice that enriches how we can see his better-known paintings.
Keep reading here, and make sure you go see Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2017 before it closes this Sunday, December 2.
