Please join us Sunday, June 22nd, at Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore for a conversation celebrating the exhibition and catalog Jack Whitten: The Messenger. Acclaimed artist Dawoud Bey, book designer Joseph Logan, and Michelle Kuo, MoMA’s Chief Curator at Large and Publisher, will discuss Whitten’s unceasingly innovative forms of abstraction and illuminate Whitten’s writings, histories, and visions of the future.

Join us in-person or livestream on Instagram @artbookps1!

Order copies at artbookstores.com.

Jack Whitten offered the world a new way to see. Over nearly six decades, he dared to invent new forms of abstraction, constantly transforming both perception and our understanding of art in society. Jack Whitten: The Messenger at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (on view through August 2, 2025) is the first comprehensive retrospective of Whitten’s dazzling and trenchant abstraction from the 1960s—2010s, which transformed the relationship between art, race, and society. Published to accompany the exhibition, this sumptuous catalog presents the full range of his career across painting, sculpture, and works on paper, produced in New York and Greece, with texts by leading art historians and artists, and new technical analyses by conservators. Previously unpublished writings by the artist and an expansive chronology of Whitten’s life, featuring newly discovered photographs and archival materials, bring into focus an artist who was as committed to human perception as to human rights, becoming one of the most important artists of our time.

Edited with text by Michelle Kuo. Text by Julie Mehretu, Glenn Ligon, Anna Deavere Smith, George Lewis, Sampada Aranke, Mark Godfrey, Richard Shiff, Annie Wilker, Michael Duffy, Dana Liljegren, David Sledge, Helena Klevorn, Kiko Aebi, Eana Kim, JaBrea Patterson-West.

Time: 4:00-6:00 pm EST

Free!

Registration