This past weekend, “Jack Whitten: The Messenger” opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Organized by chief curator at large and publisher Michelle Kuo, the show—a major, career-spanning retrospective—showcases nearly two hundred paintings, sculptures, and drawings by the Bessemer, Alabama–born artist. To celebrate the occasion, Artforum looks back to its February 2012 issue, for which Kuo, then Artforum’s editor in chief, organized and published a nine-page portfolio of Whitten’s work and featured a detail of the artist’s 1973 canvas Pink Psyche Queen on its cover.
 
Writes Kuo in her introduction: “Attempts to delimit Whitten’s work, to fit it into a story—whether that of systems art, de Kooning, Lower East Side painting, bebop, or of African-American abstractionists such as William T. Williams, Sam Gilliam, Joe Overstreet, and Ed Clark—feel inadequate, even if all these milieus play a part. . . . In his works from the 1960s through to the present . . . Whitten asks just how far the image can go.”
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan