Jack Whitten
The Mingo Altarpiece: For George Mingo, 14 September 1950 – 6 December 1996
The Mingo Altarpiece: For George Mingo, 14 September 1950 – 6 December 1996
Jack Whitten
The Mingo Altarpiece: For George Mingo 14
September 1950 – 6 December 1996
1996
Acrylic on board with sculpture by George Mingo
111.8 x 91.4 x 7.6 cm / 44 x 36 x 3 in
An extraordinary work that exemplifies Jack Whitten’s experimental techniques and ingeniously innovative compositions, ‘The Mingo Altarpiece: For George Mingo 14 September 1950 – 6 December 1996’ is also an intensely personal tribute to a fellow artist. Over the years Whitten made works in homage to a wide range of people whom he admired from Miles Davis to Malcolm X to his own mother.
He strove to capture the essence of his subjects in symbolic abstractions. ‘The Mingo Altarpiece’ features a sculpture by George Mingo, to whom the work is dedicated. A student of Whitten’s at Cooper Union, Mingo, who was known for his small bronze sculptures, eventually became a friend of the Whitten family.
Composed of Whitten’s hallmark tesserae or tessellated squares, ‘The Mingo Altarpiece’ is a testament to the artist’s relentless exploration of the materiality of paint. As Whitten emphasized: ‘I’m dealing now with paint as collage, paint as sculpture. … I don’t paint a painting, I make a painting.’ [1]
To make the tessellated squares, he lifted the paint off its support, sliced it into ribbons and laid the three-dimensional ribbons onto a wet field of paint, a process inspired by ancient mosaics. These bite-sized tesserae function as Whitten’s signature building blocks, incorporated in repeated yet variegated patterns to complete the whole. Few of Whitten’s works consist of as personal and unique of a tribute as ‘The Mingo Altarpiece’, which both honours Mingo’s life, as well as preserving his artistic legacy by incorporating it, quite literally, into Whitten’s own oeuvre.
1.) Jack Whitten quoted in Richard Shiff, ‘More Dimensions Than You Know: Jack Whitten, Paintings: 1979-1989’, Zurich/CH: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2017, p. 20.