Born
in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at
Boston University and Yale University. After graduating, she was
hired by the Museum of Modern Art, where she remained for 12 years,
from 1967–1979. She began teaching at the State University
of New York, Stony Brook, in 1979, where she is now a full professor.
Pindell
often employs a lengthy, metaphorical process of destruction/reconstruction.
She cuts canvases in strips and sews them back together, building
up surfaces in elaborate stages. She paints or draws on sheets
of paper, punches out dots from the paper using a paper hole punch,
drops the dots onto her canvas, and finally squeegees paint through
the “stencil” left in the paper from which she had
punched the dots. Almost invariably, her paintings are installed
unstretched, held to the wall merely by the strength of a few
finishing nails.
The
artist’s fascination with gridded, serialized imagery, along
with surface texture appears throughout her oeuvre. Even in her
later, more politically charged work, Pindell reverts to these
thematic focuses in order to address social issues of homelessness,
AIDs, war, genocide, sexism, xenophobia, and apartheid.
Pindell’s work has been featured many major exhibitions,
including: We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women,
1965–1985 at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2017, and
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles in 2007.
Over
the years, she's had numerous solo shows across the U.S., and
many landmark exhibitions, including, Contemporary Black Artists
in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971
and Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African-American
Women Artists in 1996 at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art,
Atlanta.
What
Remains to Be Seen is the first major retrospective of
her amazing career.
|
HOWARDENA
PINDELL
Courtesy
of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, photo ©
Katherine McMahon |