The Museum of Modern Art announces Jack Whitten: The Messenger, the first comprehensive retrospective dedicated to the groundbreaking art of Jack Whitten (American, 1939–2018), on view from March 23 through August 2, 2025, in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions. Presented solely at MoMA, the exhibition will explore the full range of Whitten’s innovative art over his nearly six-decade career, showing more than 175 works from the 1960s to the 2010s, including paintings, sculptures, rarely shown works on paper, and archival materials. Together, these works will reveal how Whitten overturned the tenets of modern art-making to become one of the most important artists of our time. Beginning his career during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Whitten was under great pressure to create directly representational art as a form of activism, yet he dared to invent new forms of abstraction and, in the process, transformed the relationship between art, memory, and society.

“Jack Whitten’s art is visionary, even prophetic,” said Michelle Kuo. “He connected painting to photography, sculpture, printmaking, music, and new technologies. He created monumental works that confront watershed moments in history, from the Civil Rights movement to the discovery of new galaxies. Whitten defied traditional boundaries between abstraction and representation, race and nation, culture and technology, individual identity and global history. He made art matter in a world in turmoil.”