Encore Presentations: Jack Whitten

The Rose Art Museum’s Encore Presentations is a series that highlights the museum’s long history of engaging emerging and leading contemporary artists in critical conversations. This Encore Presentation features a discussion between artist Jack Whitten and art historian Katy Siegel, who curated the pivotal 2013 exhibition Jack Whitten: Light Years at the Rose.

Jack Whitten (1939–2018) is celebrated for his innovative processes of applying paint to the surface of his canvases and transfiguring their material terrains. Although Whitten initially aligned with the New York circle of abstract expressionists active in the 1960s, his work gradually distanced from the movement’s aesthetic philosophy and formal concerns, focusing more intensely on the experimental aspects of process and technique that came to define his practice.