The year 1970 saw a shift in Jack Whitten’s studio methods, with rigorous systematic process replacing the lyrical gestural abstraction that had characterized his practice in the previous decade. The artist started to work horizontally on flat surfaces and use new materials and implements of his own design to generate mediated images—that is, images that dispense with the artist’s hand and compositional intention. In keeping with the language of contemporary technologies, Whitten began using the term “developed,” instead of “designed,” to describe image making with his changed approach. Realized between 1970 and ’78 using a range of dry and wet black pigments on specialty paper (sourced by his wife, paper conservator Mary Whitten), the select works on view attest to the singular spatial effects that resulted from Whitten’s experimentation. About that period, the artist has said, “Wetness as opposed to dryness expanded my interpretation of space as subject. Space became more fluid, offering the possibility of infinite dimensions.”

Made at the beginning of the decade, Studio Floor #2 (1970) and Flat Tool K (1971) thematize Whitten’s reorientation of his workstation from the vertical easel to the literal floor of his Crosby Street studio. Produced by rubbing carbon stick on broadsheets whose edges ran either parallel or orthogonal to the floorboards, these early drawings display a horizontal velocity while simultaneously registering the topography of his workplace. Hyperlocal marks, in turn, create a dimensionality that discloses Whitten’s enduring preoccupation with the depiction of space. 

In 1974, the Xerox Corporation invited Whitten and four others, including Dia collection artists Richard Serra and Robert Whitman, to conceive work using the then-new photocopiers. Unlike his peers, who took up the intended use of the machine to reproduce multiple copies of a same document, Whitten took the machine apart to redeploy its material components and technical procedures in his drawings. The toner—a dry powder mixture that at the time included silica—particularly appealed to Whitten because it is malleable when wet but print-like and slightly translucent when sealed in place by heat.

Two groups of work presented here, Study For Prime Mover and Anomaly (both 1974), use toner and seriality to emphasize difference as much as repetition across the individual images each suite comprises. Whitten made the Study For Prime Mover works by pulling toner horizontally across sheets of paper with a pliable implement. Each image in the series is the result of the medium variably flaring up, cracking, or condensing as a function of the quantity of pigment, the pressure in application, and accidents in execution. Meanwhile, for the Anomaly series, Whitten applied toner over the entirety of each sheet and then manipulated it with a serrated tool, likely a comb. Covering the paper from edge to edge, the resulting images—saturated fields of black with ghostly white punctuations—mirror the afterimage left on the Xerox machine’s ink drum after a print job, effectively inversing the mechanical process.

“What’s important here is that no separation of image, content, idea, process is allowed, it’s all compressed in the making of the object,” Whitten wrote in the mid-1970s. To make the works in Future Alpha Series (1977), the artist pulled a light acrylic mixture of his own making, which he called “slip” in reference to ceramics, across sheets of paper placed atop arrangements of flat geometric shapes. Generated by compression, the resulting silhouettes appear to flow within a dense liquid space. Showing the shadow of color reintegrated in the black-and-white system, Future Alpha Series #VII presages the return of color in the artist’s paintings toward the end of the decade. In Psychic Square Revisited (1978), instead, Whitten enlists his primary discoveries—embossing geometry by raking acrylic across the surface—to address anew the art historical trope of the black square. Like a vision or déjà vu, the square appears twice, once orthogonal to the paper on which it sits and a second time as its distorted impression. As the work’s title suggests, by the end of the decade Whitten’s newfound multidimensionality takes on powerful psychic connotations.

—Matilde Guidelli-Guidi with Emily Markert

1. Psychic Square Revisited #5, 1978
   Acrylic on Fabriano paper
   Dia Art Foundation; gift of Mary Whitten

2. Organic Series #IX, 1974
   Toner on paper
   Promised gift of Susan and Larry Marx

3–5. Anomaly #1–3, 1974
Toner on glazed paper

6. Anomaly #4, 1974
   Toner on glazed paper
   Dia Art Foundation; gift of Alice and Nahum Lainer and Nancy Lainer

7–8. Anomaly #7 and #9, 1974
Toner on glazed paper

9. Anomaly #10, 1974
   Toner on Rives paper
   Dia Art Foundation; gift of Mary Whitten

10. Future Alpha Series #II, 1977
    Collage and acrylic slip on paper
    Dia Art Foundation; gift of Holly Peterson Foundation

11–14. Future Alpha Series #III, #V, #VI, and #VII, 1977
Collage and acrylic slip on paper

15. Flat Tool K, 1971
    Compressed charcoal and dry pigment on paper
    Dia Art Foundation; purchased with funds provided by Susan and Larry Marx

16. Studio Floor #2, 1970
    Carbon-stick rubbing on paper
    Promised gift of Susan and Larry Marx

17–24. Study For Prime Mover #1–6, #8, and #10, 1974
Toner on paper 

Unless otherwise noted, all works Dia Art Foundation; gift of the Barrish Family, Sakurako and William Fisher, Agnes Gund, the Jeffrey and Leslie Fischer Family Foundation, Sheila and Bill Lambert, the Lebowitz-Aberly Family Foundation, Linda Macklowe, Susan and Larry Marx, Anthony Meier, Ilene and Michael Salcman, Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, and those who wish to remain anonymous

Jack Whitten was born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939. He moved to New York in 1960 to pursue a BFA in painting at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and lived in the city for the rest of his life. After his first trip to Greece in 1969, he regularly spent summers on the island of Crete. Sculptures made during those summers as well as widely experimental drawings accompanied his painting practice of more than five decades. Whitten had his first solo exhibition at Allan Stone Gallery in 1968, followed by early solo institutional presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 and the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1983, all in New York. In recent years, surveys of his work have been presented at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 2022–23, Jack Whitten: The Greek Alphabet Paintings was presented at Dia Beacon, New York. Whitten died in New York in 2018.

Jack Whitten | October 21, 2025