In 1968, in the months after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) decided to honor the man with an exhibition. Works by artists such as Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, and Alexander Calder would be shown and then sold to benefit King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Everything was going as planned for the October opening, until somebody noticed that the organizers had failed to include art by people of color. The oversight was addressed but only insofar as the selected works by Black artists were hastily displayed in a small room away from the main exhibition space. One of those works was For M.L.K. (1968), an abstract painting by Jack Whitten.
Whitten, who died in 2018, at 78, is now the subject of a vast solo retrospective, “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” opening tomorrow at MoMA. The exhibition brings the artist’s career full circle, and not just because of Whitten’s inclusion in the King show.
