Howardena Pindell (born 1943) is an artist, writer, curator, educator, and activist who for decades has worked to draw attention to pervasive institutional racism and sexism in the art world.1 Her paintings and mixed-media works, variously comprised of paint, punched-paper dots, fragments of photographs, and other materials, mine the formal language of abstraction as a means of illuminating autobiographical narratives, reconstructing memories, and speaking truth to power.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Pindell earned Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees at Boston University in 1965 and an Masters of Fine Arts at Yale University in 1967. For twelve years (1967–1979) she worked as a curator of prints and illustrated books at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first Black woman in a curatorial role at that institution. Writes curator Lowery Stokes Sims, “Pindell entered the New York art world as race and gender issues were beginning to dominate the discourse, and as black and women artists began to challenge the monolithic perspectives of the American art mainstream. She developed a strong point of view regarding issues of exclusion and inclusion, and would evolve into a tireless and insistent catalyst for pushing the limits of discussions on these issues. Her writings, lectures, and presentations emanated from her own experiences and deeply felt sense of indignation.”2 In 1979, Pindell began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, achieving the rank of Distinguished Professor. She has received numerous grants and awards, including two honorary doctorates, at Massachusetts College of Art and Parsons School of Design/The New School in New York.

Experimenting materially and conceptually, Pindell continued to produce art while working as a curator and educator, a testament to her curiosity and her tenacity as an artist. She began as a painter. While some of her earliest paintings are figurative, she was increasingly drawn to color field painting, the organizing principles of minimalism, and conceptualism as a means to interrogate and expand the boundaries of art world expectations. Untitled (1972) is an example of Pindell’s turn to abstraction that laid the ground for her future work. Subtle color variations across the canvas suggest vertical folds reminiscent of the unstretched color field canvases of artists such as Sam Gilliam (1933-2022). The all-over effect of this painting is accented by a stenciled rectangle, demarcated by lighter-colored sprayed paint around its edges. To create the painting’s field of layered color, Pindell used as a stencil a piece of paper filled with circles, made using a hole-punch, through which she sprayed multiple colors of paint; the dots punched from this paper stencil would become part of other works of art. Pindell has spoken of the circle in relation to mathematics and astronomy, and as evocative of a hurtful childhood experience, when drinks purchased during family travels through Kentucky were served in mugs marked with a red circle on the bottom so that they would not be used to serve drinks to white customers.

The indignation that informed Pindell’s activism and writing also fueled much of her art. In their introduction to the publication that accompanied the artist’s 2018 retrospective at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, curators Naomi Beckwith and Valerie Cassel Oliver compare Pindell to artists who maintained a distinction between their art and their political and social activities, writing, “Pindell was among the first wave of academically trained artists to dismiss this separation and assert that the pressures, prejudices, and exclusions placed upon her – as a black artist and as a woman – played out as much in the art world as they did in the greater social world and, as such, were fair and necessary content for her art practice.”3 This is evident in works such as Pindell’s videorecorded performance Free, White, and 21 (1980), an incisive critique of structural racism that is imbued with autobiographically grounded expressive power, as well as mixed-media pieces that address Pindell’s social and political concerns.

Pindell’s work became more personally referential following a life-threatening car accident in 1979 that resulted in a head injury and severe memory loss. Her Autobiography series of mixed-media works on canvas addresses the recuperation of individual, familial, and collective histories and memories. The process of reconstructing fragmentary lived and remembered experiences became materially literal in these pieces, as Pindell cut and then sewed strips of canvas to form the substrates onto which she layered, among other materials, acrylic paint, printed text, and strips of postcards arranged to suggest movement through the landscapes they represent. Many of these collaged canvases invoke water, particularly the traumatic Middle Passage – the forced traversal of the Atlantic Ocean by people brought from Africa to be enslaved in the Americas – and Pindell’s own experiences of travel. Pindell has traveled extensively, in Japan, Brazil, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. Autobiography: Lost Memory (Tanabata/Aurelia) of 1982 includes fragments of photographs and painted paper that appear through apertures in layered conglomerations of thickly applied paint, hole-punched dots, and other bits of cut paper, atop sutured pieces of canvas. The title juxtaposes two contrasting travel memories: a summer festival in Japan and Pindell’s terrifying experience crossing the Atlantic in 1964 as a student, when the boat on which she was traveling, named the Aurelia, was caught in a hurricane.

Pindell continues her decades-long dedication to abstraction, foregrounded by art historian Sarah Louise Cowan as central to the formation and trajectory of 20th- and 21st-century Black feminist modernisms.4 The minimalist grid continues to be the basis for much of Pindell’s work – a formal foundation that is also suggestive of the art world boundaries and limitations that she has challenged throughout her career. She imbricates into this foundation her social and political perspectives and concerns, persistent critique of racism and sexism in the art world and the world at large, interests in ritual and spirituality as well as mathematics and science, and her lived experience as a Black woman whose interests and commitments, like her work, are complexly layered.

Melanie Anne Herzog