Jack Whitten is the recipient of the 2025 ARTnews Award for his retrospective "Jack Whitten: The Messenger" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, running from March 23 to August 2, 2025. Curated by Michelle Kuo with Helena Klevorn, Dana Liljegren, and David Sledge, the exhibition features 175 works spanning Whitten's six-decade career, highlighting his innovative use of acrylic paint, his custom squeegee-like tool called the Developer, and his mosaic-like paintings made from dried acrylic chips. The show includes early works from the civil rights era, mid-career homages to Black thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, and a monumental abstraction memorializing 9/11.
The award matters because it recognizes an artist who, despite his groundbreaking contributions to abstraction, was long excluded from the art-historical canon. This retrospective, the first major museum show since Whitten's death in 2018, affirms his place as a defining abstractionist and ensures his complex, material-driven practice gains the recognition it deserves. The article also lists other nominees for the 2025 ARTnews Awards, including Alvin Ailey, Ruth Asawa, Noah Davis, and Madalena Santos Reinbolt, underscoring a broader institutional effort to honor historically overlooked artists.