Howardena Pindell

Howardena Pindell
Born Howardena Pindell
(1943-04-14) April 14, 1943
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Nationality American
Education BFA, Boston University, School of Fine and Applied Arts,1965
MFA, Yale School of Art and Architecture,1967
Known for Painting, collage, video art, mixed media

Howardena Pindell, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 14, 1943, to Howard and Mildred (Lewis) Douglas, is an American abstract artist. Her work explores texture, color, structures, and the process of making art; it is often political, addressing the intersecting issues of racism, feminism, violence, slavery, and exploitation. She is known for her use of unconventional materials in her paintings including string, perfume, glitter, and postcards.[1]

Howardena Pindell is represented exclusively by Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.[2]

Early Life

Howardena Pindell had a black middle-class upbringing in Philadelphia. Her parents always placed extraordinary emphasis on neatness, which would later be visible in her artwork. In fact, at the age of 8 she had already declared that she wanted to be an artist.

Pindell graduated from the Philadelphia High School for Girls. From a young age, she demonstrated promise in figurative art classes at the Philadelphia College of Art, the Fleisher Art Memorial, and the Tyler School of Art.[3] She received her BFA from Boston University in 1965 and her MFA from Yale University in 1967. She also holds honorary doctorates from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Parsons The New School for Design.[4]

Though she initially began her practice with figurative paintings, once she earned her MFA and moved to New York, her style would change dramatically. After graduating from Yale, she began working at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, where she was employed from 1967-1979 as an exhibit assistant, curatorial assistant, and associate curator.[1][3][4] In 1977, she became associate curator of the department of Prints and Illustrated Books.[4][5] She continued to spend her nights creating her own pieces, drawing inspiration from many of the exhibits hosted by MoMA, especially the museum's collection of Akan batakari tunics in the exhibit African Textiles and Decorative Arts.[3] Because her days were taken up with work at the MoMA, some say that her work shifted from figurative to abstract because she could no longer rely on natural light and a model to be present when she worked at night.

In the mid-1970s, she began travelling abroad as a guest speaker and lecturer. Her seminars included "Current American and Black American Art: A Historical Survey" at the Madras College of Arts and Crafts in India 1975, and "Black Artists, U.S.A." at the Academy of Art in Oslo, Norway 1976.[6]

Currently, Pindell is a professor of art at Stony Brook University, where she has taught since 1979.[4] From 1995-1999, she worked as a visiting professor in the art department at Yale University.[4] Since leaving her job at MoMA to become a professor, Pindell has had more time for both art making and political activism. Throughout her entire artistic career, Pindell has written in many publications addressing the racism she has personally faced in the art world, as well as the biases the art world projects onto other artists. She has looked at statistics about how many artists of color and women get gallery and museum shows, compared to their more highly acclaimed white male counterparts. She has also questioned the role of the art critic and hypothesizes that value judgements are deeply intertwined with racism and sexism. Though her art is often abstract, these themes are addressed quite frequently.

Artistic Career

Pindell's 1989 painting Queens, Festival, in the lobby of the Joseph P. Addabbo Federal Building, Queens, New York. The work is acrylic, paper, and gouache on canvas.

Pindell had known she wanted to be an artist since age 8, but over the years her style has evolved, as has her subject matter. The first shift occurred after she received her masters from Yale in 1967. It was in this time, after moving to New York, when she began her work with abstraction and collaging, finding inspiration in the work of fellow grad school student Nancy Murata.[3] Her earliest paintings had been mostly urban scenes, but in the 1970s, she began developing a unique style seemingly rooted in minimalism and pointillism. As she experimented with the process of creating her paintings, Pindell began making use of the scrap circles of oaktag paper that resulted from the production of her pointillist works. As David Bourdon writes, "By 1974, Pindell developed a more three-dimensional and more personal form of pointillism, wielding a paper punch to cut out multitudes of confetti-like disks, which she dispersed with varying degrees of premeditation and randomness over the surfaces of her pictures."[3][7]

In 1969, Pindell gained recognition for her participation in the exhibition American Drawing Biennial XXIII at the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, and by 1972, had her first major exhibition at Spelman College in Atlanta.[6] In 1973, her work with circles received acclaim at a show in the A.I.R. (Artists-In-Residence) Gallery in SoHo (which she helped to found), where her style had solidified into expression through "large-scale, untitled, nonrepresentational, abstract paintings." [3]

The spray paintings of the early 1970s, which made use of the scrap pieces of paper from which holes had been punched, were dark and smoldering, yet there was also a shimmering light. This appearance of light would carry on as Pindell began building up the punched out dots on the actually canvas, sometimes even sprinkling glitter across the surface, too. These canvases were rich visual feasts of color and light.

In these years, Pindell also describes feeling great influence in her work from the Black Power and feminist movements, as well as from exposure to new art forms during her day job at MoMA and her travels abroad (particularly to Africa).[8] She became fascinated by traditional African Art (exhibited at MoMA and in the Brooklyn Museum of Art), and began to mirror the African art practices of encoding and accumulation in her own work.[3] The material of these pieces also informed Pindell's work: while African art embraces the use of objects in sculpture such as beads, horns, shells, hair, and claws, so Pindell's collages began to incorporate additional elements including paper, glitter, acrylic, and dye.[3]

In the mid 1970s, and again in 2007, Pindell worked on a series of what she called "Video Drawings." She would write out small numerals on acetate, stick the acetate to a television screen - sometimes during a sports game or political broadcast - and photograph the screen with a shutter speed of 1/15th of a second. The result was often a blurry image, like the motion studies of Etienne-Jules Marey. However, the use of numbers was interesting because it was hard to extract meaning from them; thus, they became images of themselves.

In 1979, Pindell was in a traumatic car accident from which she suffered severe loss of memory. It was at this point that her work became much more autobiographical, in part as an effort to help herself heal.[8][9] Her painting Autobiography, which was part of an eight-painting series on her recovery, used Pindell's own body as the focal point. For this piece, she cut and sewed a traced outline of herself onto a large piece of canvas as part of a complex collage.[9] She also started collaging postcards from friends and from her own travels into her work. She'd often cut the postcards into angular strips and paste them an inch or so apart, leaving room to paint between the strips. The repetition of forms created a vibrating, fractured feel. Yet her reason for using postcards was to spark her memory that has been affected in the car accident.

Throughout the 1980s, she continued to work with expressions of identity through her painting, particularly on her own negotiation of multiple identities, as she claims heritage that blends African, European, Seminole, Central American, and Afro-Caribbean roots, along with her position as ethnically Jewish, raised Christian.[9] During this time, her pieces also became increasingly political, addressing women's issues, racism, child abuse, slavery, and AIDS. According to Pindell herself, among critics of this new work, "There was a nostalgia for my non-issue related work of the 1970s."[8]

In 1980 she made a video called Free, White, and 21, in which she appears in a blonde wig, dark glasses, and with a pale stocking over her head as a caricature of a white woman, discussing instances of racism that she has experienced throughout her life.[1] Soon she began expending a particular focus on racism in the art world, a subject on which she has published multiple writings. In 1980, she openly addressed what she considered to be the persistent presence of racism even within the feminist movement, organizing a show at AIR titled The Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the US.[10] Then after becoming aware that she had often been selected for exhibition as a token black among a group of other artists, she and Carolyn Martin cofounded a cross-generational black women's artist collective called "Entitled: Black Women Artists," that has since grown to international membership, likely thanks to Pindell's consistent travel and lecturing.[6][8] Over the years, she has visited five continents and lived in Japan, Sweden, and India for periods of time, all the while producing new work, and lecturing/writing on racism and the art community.[9]

By the 1980s, Pindell started working on unstretched canvas, as well. A few large scale works have a similar effect of looking totally white from a distance but actually being made up of tiny dots of colored paper, sequins, and paint. Pindell likened this experience of viewing her paintings to whitewashing her own identity to make it more palatable for the art world. However, she also was met with criticism because this work was not overtly political in appearance. At this time, she also began combining the ideas of the video drawings and the hole punched works; she started adding numbers to each individual hole punch and arranging them in extremely neat rows. However, the numbers were all out of order, so, once again, there was no discernible meaning.

In the 1990s, Pindell displayed a series of memorial works in addition to a sequence of "word" paintings, in which her body in silhouette is overlaid with words such as "slave trade," (this is not unlike an earlier work about South Africa that features a slashed canvas roughly stitched back together and the word "INTERROGATION" laid on top).[8]

Exhibitions

Since her first major show at Spelman in 1972, Pindell has exhibited almost every year for over 30 years, either as a solo artist, or in a group exhibition. Her work is part of permanent collections in the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, High Museum in Atlanta, Newark Museum, Fogg Museum in Cambridge Massachusetts, Whitney Museum of American Art, and more. Additionally, her work has seen international and esteemed exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Chase-Manhattan Bank in New York, and Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut.[6]

Solo Exhibitions

1971

1973

1974

1976–1977

1977

1978

1979

1980

1981

1983

1985

1986

1987

1989

1990

1992

1993

1995

1996

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2006

2007

2009

2013

2014

2015

Group Exhibitions

1969

1971

1972

1973

1974

1975

1975–1976

1976

1976–1977

1976–1979

1977

1977–1978

1978

1979

1980

1980–1984

1981

1982

1982–1983

1983

1984

1985–1986

1985–1987

1986

1987

1987–1988

1988

1988–1989

1989

1990

1991

1995

1996

1996–1998

1996–1999

1998

2000

2002

2002–2004

2003

2003–2004

2004

2004–2005

2005

2006

2006–2007

2007

2007–2009

2008

2009

2010

2010–2011

2011

2012

2013–2014

2014–2015

2015

2015–2016

2016

2016–2017

2017

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, London, July 12–October 22

2017–2019

Collections

Awards

Pindell has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting in 1987, the Most Distinguished Body of Work or Performance Award, granted by the College Art Association in 1990, the Studio Museum of Harlem Artist Award, the Distinguished Contribution to the Profession Award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 1996, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.[6][11][12][13]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Howardena Pindell Biography - Selected works - Art, York, College, and Award - JRank Articles". Biography.jrank.org. Retrieved 2013-01-13.
  2. ↑ "Howardena Pindell". Garth Greenan Gallery. Retrieved 27 October 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Barnwell, AD (1996). "Been To Africa and Back- Contextualizing Howardena Pindell's Abstract Art". International Review of African American Art 13.3.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 "Howardena Pindell". SBU Art. Retrieved January 10, 2013.
  5. ↑ Mark, Lisa Gabrielle (2007). WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Cambridge: MIT Press.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Smith, Jesse Carney, Lean’tin Bracks, and Linda T. Wynn. “Howardena Pindell.” The Complete Encyclopedia of African American History. Visible Ink, 2015. 272-73. Print.
  7. ↑ "Howardena Pindell - Biography". Sternreigen.rogallery.com. 1943-04-14. Retrieved 2013-01-13.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 Mira Schor, Emma Amos, Susan Bee, Johanna Drucker, María Fernández, Amelia Jones, Shirley Kaneda, Helen Molesworth, Howardena Pindell, Mira Schor, Collier Schorr & Faith Wilding (1999) Contemporary Feminism: Art Practice, Theory, and Activism—An Intergenerational Perspective, Art Journal, 58:4, 8-29, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.1999.10791962
  9. 1 2 3 4 Walker, Sydney. "The Artist in Search of Self: Howardena Pindell." School Arts 94.1 (1994): 29. Web.
  10. ↑ Reckitt, Helena, and Peggy Phelan. Art and Feminism. London; New York, NY; Phaidon, 2001. Print.
  11. ↑ "Howardena Pindell". African American Art Exhibitions. Retrieved January 10, 2013.
  12. ↑ Farris, Phoebe (1999). Women Artists of Color: A Bio-critical Sourcebook to 20th Century Artists in the Americas. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
  13. ↑ Henkes, Robert (1993-01-01). The art of Black American women: works of twenty-four artists of the twentieth century. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0899508189.

External links

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