LAST OCTOBER, ART21 collaborated with Jack Whitten (1939-2018) on a short film about his life and work. Shot in his studio, “An Artist’s Life: Jack Whitten” captures him making a painting titled “Quantum Wall, VIII (For Arshile Gorky, My First Love In Painting),” as he explains his innovative methods and techniques. He also talks about his backstory—growing up in Alabama, experiencing the Civil Rights Movement, which turned “vicious and violent,” and how he ended up in New York, where he graduated from The Cooper Union in 1964. Whitten died in January, three months after the filming, and the Gorky painting turned out to be his last. “My first influence was Arshile Gorky. ‘Nobody Springs forth from the Head of Zeus.’ That was my first influence,” he says about the Armenian American artist who worked in Abstract Expressionism. Another painting, this one memorializing rock and roll legend Chuck Berry, who died March 18, 2017, at age 90, hangs in Whitten’s Queens studio. After he started it, he developed a serious illness and was in the hospital for a month. “That painting came out of a lot of pain. …That painting was a way of hitting back. I am not going … Continue reading New ART21 Film Documents Jack Whitten in the Studio Working on His Last Painting