Specializing in Geometric Abstract Sculpture
John Whitehead was born in Demerara, Guyana. He came to the United States at age five and grew up in various inner-city neighborhoods on the west side of Oakland, California. At an early age, John showed a high appreciation and ability for visual arts, spatial relationships, and math. By the age of ten, without any formal training, he had begun painting in oils, creating architectural models, working in clay, and drawing imaginative abstract images.
John’s formal training in art began while he was attending Hoover Middle School in West Oakland. Unfortunately, his middle school art classes did not seriously challenge him nor contribute much to his artistic growth. So, by the time John entered high school, he had abandoned all hope of ever growing as an artist or sculptor.
And then, a miracle occurred. Assigned to a sculpting class at the request of his Aunt Ina, he was introduced to the teachings of Richard Davies, a dedicated and talented high school art teacher at McClymonds High School in West Oakland. Under his astute tutelage, John was exposed to a whole new approach to art, which emphasized geometric abstraction, constructivist art, and abstract expressionist sculpture. Armed with this new approach, John entered and won a major Oakland Unified School District-sponsored art competition and placed either second or third in several other local art competitions.
In 1976, John enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley. He wanted to study art at Berkeley but was advised by his mother and other family members to pursue a degree in a field that would allow him to permanently escape from inner-city poverty, the trappings of which had defined much of his childhood and early young adult life. After accepting this advice with great resistance, he decided to pursue a major in economics with a minor in art and in 1979, received his B.A. in economics with high honors. In 1986, he was awarded a master’s degree in economics with magna cum laude distinction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Over a 25-year period, beginning in 1990, John taught economics as a tenured professor at City College of San Francisco. Although his early passion and ability for visual arts were largely neglected for most of those years, the urge to do creative artistic work remained. So, around 2005, about ten years before retirement, he started laying the groundwork for his eventual serious return to geometric abstract sculpture. At that time, John began creating beautiful multi-colored abstract wall sculptures from various art media.
From 2010 to 2020, John’s body of work mainly consisted of mirror-polished stainlesss steel and aluminum sculpture with varying geometric shapes, patterning curves, and spaces. The design, boundaries, and movements of many of these pieces were influenced by David Smith’s “Cubi” series, Fletcher Benson’s “Folded-Circle” series, and George Rickey’s “Cluster of Cubes” sculpture, and other works in the abstract expressionist and constructivist traditions. As a result, these sculptures reflect a high level of geometric abstraction and often contain objects that are perched precariously atop each other, appearing to defy gravity and/or displaying a balance/imbalance dynamic.
John is now broadening his sculptural work to include sculpture integrating the geometric aspects of his past works with a variety of contemporary African diasporic and cubist artistic paradigms. Influenced by the stunning beauty and elegance of his award winning 2023 sculpture, “The Numen of Wood,” John will also be producing many of his new sculpture out of African mahogany, walnut, and other original wood.