Whitten arrived in New York in 1960. His artistic milieu was that of a generation grappling with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. He adopted the action orientation of that group, and was also quite interested in following up on their interest in explorations of the collective unconscious. Personal identity and experience are recurring themes in his art, accompanied by a great deal of wit.

Whitten solidified his commitment to process art in a 1965 series of black-and-white paintings. The canvases were made by screening paint through fibers and discovering his imagery once the excess paint had been removed. After this initial experiment, he continued to manipulate his work, combing pools of acrylic with Afro-picks, brooms, saw blades, and homemade rakes. He called these tools his “developers,” alternately spreading paint into bands of color and then making incisions in its thick concretions. While his earlier paintings may evoke the abstract expressionist work of Mark Rothko, his later works have a more late modernist orientation to the dynamic of surface as a site of optical illusion and plastic presence. His confrontation of this paradox of space was, as with all his aesthetic challenges, grounded in the larger conviction that the struggle itself was a key to understanding even deeper mysteries of time and place.

Whitten briefly turned to oils in the 1980s, but after a 1980 studio fire, he again turned to acrylic as his preferred medium. Since then he has poured acrylic into molds, cut it into tiles, and made both mosaic-like paintings and mixed-media collages on canvas, often incorporating ordinary elements like coffee, tinfoil, and hair.

Jack Whitten’s awards include a John Hay Whitney Opportunity Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Xerox Corporation grant, a New York State Council on the Arts CAPS grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Sambuca Romana Contemporary Art Fellowship.