Howardena Pindell | |
|---|---|
 Pindell in 2019 | |
| Born | April 14, 1943 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Boston University, Yale School of Art and Architecture |
| Occupation(s) | artist, curator, and educator |
| Known for | Painting, collage, video art, mixed media |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship (1987) |
Howardena Pindell (born April 14, 1943) is an American artist, curator and educator.[1] She is known as a painter and mixed media artist,[2] 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 the wide variety of techniques and materials used in her artwork; she has created abstract paintings, collages, "video drawings," and "process art."[3]
Howardena Pindell was born on April 14, 1943, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was raised in the neighborhood of Germantown.[4][2] Her parents were Mildred (née Lewis) and Howard Douglas Pindell, she was an only child.[5][6] She 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.[7]
She received her BFA degree in 1965 from Boston University, and her MFA degree in 1967 from Yale University.[5][8][9] Pindell had studied color theory under Sewell Sillman.[10]
In 1967, Pindell began working in the Arts Education Department at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, later moving on to a curatorial position in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books.[11][12] She would continue to work at MoMA for the next 12 years (until 1979) in a variety of capacities, including exhibit assistant, curatorial assistant, and associate curator.[7][13]
In 1972, Pindell co-founded the A.I.R. Gallery, which was the first artist-directed gallery for women artists in the United States.[14] There were twenty artist cofounders, including Nancy Spero, Agnes Denes, Barbara Zucker, Dotty Attie, Judith Bernstein, Harmony Hammond, Maude Boltz, Louise Kramer, and others.[15] At the first meeting, held on March 17, 1972, Pindell suggested naming the gallery the "Eyre Gallery" after the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.[15] The artists decided to name the gallery "A.I.R. Gallery" instead, which stands for "Artists in Residence."[15] The gallery allowed women artists to curate their own exhibitions, allowing them the freedom to take risks with their work in ways that commercial galleries would not.[15]
In the mid-1970s, she began traveling 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.[16]
By 1977, she was associate curator of MoMA's department of Prints and Illustrated Books.[13][17] 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.[7] While working at MoMA, Pindell created a statistical report spanning 7 years where she surveyed art institutions and galleries in New York state that were featuring representation by Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American artists and designers.[1] Her statistical findings were published in March 1989 issue of ARTnews, and found that 54 out of 64 of the surveyed art institutions and galleries (in New York state) represented 90% or greater white artists.[1]
Currently, Pindell is a professor of art at Stony Brook University, where she has taught since 1979.[13] She was a visiting professor in the art department at Yale University from 1995 to 1999.[13]
She was interviewed for the film !Women Art Revolution (2010).[18]
Following her graduation from the MFA program specializing in painting at Yale University in 1967, Pindell moved to New York City.[5] It was in New York City where she began to work with abstraction and collaging, finding inspiration in the work of fellow grad school student Nancy Silvia Murata.[7] By the 1970s, she began developing a unique style, rooted in the use of dots and reminiscent of minimalism and pointillism.[19] From working with dots, Pindell began making use of the scrap circles of oaktag paper that resulted from the production of her pointillist works. 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."[7][20] One example of this is a 17 x 90 inch, untitled drawing-collage from 1973; Pindell used over 20 thousand hand-numbered paper dots to form vertical and horizontal rows with rhythmic peacefulness, uniting order and chaos .[21]
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.[16]
In 1973, her work with circles received acclaim at a show in the A.I.R. (Artists-In-Residence) Gallery in SoHo where her style had solidified into expression through "large-scale, untitled, nonrepresentational, abstract paintings".[7] Also in 1973, Pindell began work on her "Video Drawings" series.[22] At the advice of her doctor, Pindell bought a television for her studio to encourage her from working long hours on her dot works.[22] She became interested in the artificial light from her television monitor, and began to write out small numerals on acetate, which she stuck to the TV screen.[22] She then photographed her drawings placed over the monitor.[22] These experiments lead to a long series of works that feature her drawings over sporting events and news broadcastings, including televised elections.[22]
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 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).[23] She became fascinated by African sculpture exhibited at MoMA and in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and began to mirror the practice of encoding and accumulation in her own work.[7] 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.[7]
By the 1980s, Pindell was also working on unstretched canvas. 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.
In 1979, Pindell was in a traumatic car accident, from which she suffered severe memory loss.[24] It was at this point that her work became much more autobiographical, in part as an effort to help herself heal.[23][25] 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.[25] 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. Her reason for using postcards was to spark her memory that had been affected in the car accident.
In 1980, she made a video called Free, White, and 21,[26] 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.[citation needed] "You really must be paranoid," Pindell says performing the white woman, "I have never had experiences like that. But, of course, I am free, white and 21."[27] 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 the persistent presence of racism even within the feminist movement, organizing a show at A.I.R. Gallery titled The Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the US.[28] She became increasingly 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.[16][23] 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.[25]
Throughout the 1980s, she continued to work with expressions of identity through her painting, particularly on her own negotiation of multiple identities, as her heritage includes African, European, Seminole, Central American, and Afro-Caribbean roots, along with her position as ethnically Jewish, raised Christian.[25] During this time, her pieces also became increasingly political, addressing women's issues, racism, child abuse, slavery, and AIDS.[11] According to Pindell, among critics of this new work, "There was a nostalgia for my non-issue related work of the 1970s."[23]
In the 1990s, Pindell displayed a series of memorial works and a sequence of "word" paintings, in which her body in silhouette is overlaid with words such as "slave trade." This later series is reminiscent of an earlier work about South Africa that features a slashed canvas roughly stitched back together and the word "INTERROGATION" laid on top.[23]
In the late 1940s, early 1950s, Howardena gained inspiration for her more circular artworks from a root beer bottle she saw while with her parents in Ohio. The bottom of the mug had a big red circle on it, a mark once placed on dishes and silverware used to serve people of color in the south.[29]
Since her first major show at Spelman in 1971, Pindell has exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions.
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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, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships[16][35][36][37] and a United States Artists fellowship in 2020.[38]
She also holds honorary doctorates from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Parsons The New School for Design.[13]
