Mac Whitney: Man of Steel

Mac Whitney has been making art since he was a boy on the family farm in Kansas. He “never quit,” he says.

He started by making his own toys. “World War II was going on and you couldn’t buy any,” he explains. His family was “always hard up.” They raised wheat, purebred Duroc hogs, and honeybees. In addition, his father taught biology at the local college. His mother was “a maker.” She was “always making something out of nothing,” says Whitney — dresses for his two older sisters, for instance.

Now nearing 90, Whitney is still making art, bending and cutting steel, driving forklifts, climbing onto the second-story roof of his studio to repair a leak, building a large metal shed during the Pandemic. All on his own. “He’d build a bridge if it was up to him,” says artist Scott Madison, who worked as Whitney’s assistant in the 70s. A legend in his own time, Whitney is one of Texas’ most prominent artists, known for his massive abstract works of iron and steel, as well as lighter lyrical metal pieces seemingly hand-drawn in the air.

His sculptures, prints, and paintings are being shown in Houston simultaneously at Gallery Sonja Roesch and Andrew Durham Gallery through Jan. 25. 

A Wonderland on the Northeast Texas Prairie

Whitney started working on the family farm when he was fifteen, learned welding in vocational class in high school in order to repair farm equipment, and then invented some things when he was 20, like a two-wheel trailer for towing cars and a post-puller. His early sculpture was created out of old pieces of farm equipment, remnants of horse-drawn threshers and mowers found in Kansas fields.

After receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Kansas in 1968 (and after losing three fingers of his left hand to a table saw while making furniture), he was offered a show at the short-lived Main Place Gallery in Dallas. At the time he was making sculpture out of cast acrylic.

He decided to move to Dallas, where he became part of an internationally-known group of artists in Oak Cliff, an area then known as Dallas’ “Left Bank.” The group included George T. Green, Jack Mims, Jim Roche, and Robert (Daddy-O) Wade, known as the Oak Cliff 4 — or 5, a number which controversially did or did not include Whitney, usually because his abstract work was categorically different from the figurative, more culturally Texan art of the others. Hard to imagine that the loner Whitney cared.

“Oak Cliff Line Up,” 1972. Photograph made by Robert (Daddy-O) Wade by projecting five separate negatives, one at a time. Left to right: George T. Green, Jack Mims, Jim Roche, Mac Whitney, and Bob Wade

Around 1983 Whitney bought a 22.5-acre property on forested Red Oak Creek in Ovilla, outside of Midlothian, south of Dallas, on the northeast Texas prairie. There he built his own studio and modest living quarters out of corrugated metal. The compound is a wonderland, crowded with  shining, soaring, thrusting, reaching, folding, bowing, rusting rhythmic figures in iron and steel, some red or yellow, standing, stepping, dancing, in and out of the shadows of oaks and junipers into the tall prairie grasses. Even the tree branches and piles of cut logs seem to swing and tumble to the force of Whitney’s creativity.

References to farm equipment — tillers, hoes, saw blades, and more — abound. “There are all kinds of beautiful elements in farm equipment,” Whitney told an interviewer in 2014. “Most people don’t give a damn.”

Field of sculptures in morning light at Mac Whitney’s compound, Ovilla, Tex. Photo: Susan Chadwick

Sculpture field, Mac Whitney compound, Ovilla, Tex. Photo: Susan Chadwick

Parked here and there are old cars and trucks, tall cranes, and other equipment that Whitney uses to force the heavy metal to bend to his will. “You can bend three-quarter-inch plate any way you want to bend it,” he said, describing the process of using his two-ton 1951 Chevrolet winch truck and 200-feet of cable. “But it’s dangerous. You can get your head lopped off.”

He likens the process to being a solo mountain climber, asking himself, “Can I climb that son of a bitch without gettin’ killed?” Working from a maquette for the big ones, Whitney calculates, engineers, cuts and bends all his pieces on his own, figuring out whether it will work and stand up or not. 

Shining sculpture sitting under a cedar tree, Whitney compound, Ovilla, Tex. Photo: Susan Chadwick

Cut curves of flat, rusted metal plate lie around in the grass under the trees as well as on the floor of the spacious studio where Whitney forges his sculpture, surrounded by enormous stacks of steel plate, coiling power cords, fire safety equipment, and high on a top shelf, an old toy Radio Flyer wagon and a couple of wooden sleds.

Worktable in sculpture studio. Photo: Susan Chadwick

When it gets too hot to throw flames, Whitney retreats to his upstairs studio to work in two-dimensions, most recently using the curving slices of flat metal to outline tumbling, floating shapes painted on canvas.

Mac Whitney’s upstairs painting studio. Photo: Susan Chadwick

Whitney cites as primary influences the artist David Smith, who worked as a welder and also drew on his farming background for his large-scale geometric sculpture, as well as Julio González and Alexander Calder.

In Houston, his public work can be seen in Stude Park off Interstate 10, a 50,000-pound, 50-foot-tall soaring monument in red, titled “Houston,” installed in 1981. More recently the Houston Airport System acquired a piece, “Batson,” created in 2001 of interlocking U-shaped welded steel, now painted red. No connection to Billy Batson, says Whitney, the boy who turns into the superhero Captain Marvel by saying the magic word “SHAZAM.” Most of Whitney’s titles are drawn from place names on the map of Texas.

Mac Whitney loading sculpture, Ovilla, Tex. Oct 22, 2024. Photo: Susan Chadwick

Mac Whitney: Interconnected Elements will be simultaneously on view at Gallery Sonja Roesch and Andrew Durham Gallery, in Houston through Jan. 25.