Jack Whitten
Black Hands
Black Hands
Jack Whitten
Black Hands
2015
Sumi ink, rice paper, acrylic on canvas
247.3 x 100.7 cm / 97 3/8 x 39 5/8 in
Black Hands
2015
Sumi ink, rice paper, acrylic on canvas
247.3 x 100.7 cm / 97 3/8 x 39 5/8 in
2015
Sumi ink, rice paper, acrylic on canvas
247.3 x 100.7 cm / 97 3/8 x 39 5/8 in
In 2015, Jack Whitten wrote an op-ed for the Walker Art Center, ‘A Circle of Blood: Art in Times of Unspeakable Violence’. ‘Racism and violence are something I have dealt with all my life, and I am fully aware of their poisonous effects on society,’ he described. ‘My art is an antidote used to counteract this poison.
Art has the power to heal and restore balance both in the individual and society as a whole.’ [1] Writing about racism in America, Whitten’s references are wide-ranging, foregrounding empathy and connectedness. In the essay and subjects of his paintings, he moves seamlessly between personal experience growing up as a boy in Alabama, to the refugee crisis, to the elementary school shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Created the same year, ‘Black Hands’ exemplifies Whitten’s singular approach to painting within what he called the American Apartheid with nuance and insight.
Black Hands’ consists of five rectangular canvases, stacked in a row. Handprints in black acrylic paint and sumi ink stretch across a gray-white canvas. The hands are of different sizes, widths, and orientations; their heterogeneity suggests that the painting has no singular subject, only a collective.
The work’s title and color scheme directly confront themes of racism in America, but the work’s contents elide rigid categories. Delicate lines of paint crisscross and encircle the handprints, callings to mind Whitten’s early Abstract Expressionist works. The result is a depiction both local and global. For Whitten, in the face of such tremendous violence, art above all else offers hope: ‘art is the only thing I have to offer, the only thing I trust.’ [2] Whitten offers ‘Black Hands’, capturing such urgent themes with powerful visual efficiency.
1). Jack Whitten, “A Circle of Blood”, Walker Art Center Magazine, December 2015.
2). Jack Whitten: Jack’s Jacks, eds. Udo Kittelmann and Sven Beckstette, Berlin: Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Munich: Prestel, 2019, p. 202.