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Introduction
Howardena Pindell’s spray dot paintings are among her most iconic works. The artist first created these sensuous paintings in New York in the early 1970s. Using various hole punchers and tools, she punched into discarded cardstock, manila folders and heavy watercolour paper, the result of which she used as templates, spraying paint through the perforations across large-scale canvases to create fluctuating veils of colour. In the past few years, for the first time in decades, Pindell has revisited this technique with renewed creativity and excitement, integrating geometric shapes and experimenting with different sizes of dots across these fields of colour. Conceived for the gallery in London, this exhibition marks the first solo presentation of these new works, featuring a monumental diptych.
Each of Pindell’s spray dot paintings investigates themes of control, chance and the interaction of colour according to saturation and hue – topics that have been of interest to the artist since the beginning of her career. She describes her relationship to colour and its application as an intuitive process, with Josef Albers’ colour theory course at Yale University a catalyst in her development from figuration to abstraction early in her career and a touchstone of her practice. While studying at Yale, a fellow graduate student’s use of the circle awakened a childhood memory in Pindell; on a road trip with her father in Kentucky, she was served a mug of root beer with a red painted circle on the bottom – the circle indicated the separate utensils and serving ware for Black people in the Jim Crow era South. Pindell’s repeated use of the circle, which she describes as ‘an iconic form that appears on a cosmic scale in nature,’ can be read partly as an act of catharsis and transformation – she is fascinated with its appearance across the natural world, from molecules to solar systems, and with its subliminal potency as a shameful cultural artefact in US civil rights history.
The artist’s process might be considered a kind of pointillism freed from the burden of representation. Through repeated action, Pindell’s ranks of dots, grid-like in essence, become energised optical fields, supporting myriad fluctuations of colour, tone and light. Often appearing predominantly as a single hue from a distance, up close the paintings unfold as a series of shifting sensations, one colour pulsing with or against another, the energy of these constituent parts taking on a different character in minutiae, akin to cells or pixels. Pindell’s expansive canvases are the result of years spent thinking about studies into the great range of emotional responses elicited by colour, discussions surrounding the meaning and cultural significance of colour, and colours found in the natural world, such as glaciers, bioluminescent plankton, and solar storms.
In this latest body of work, she has been experimenting with free-flow geometric forms, drawing upon her childhood memories of what she saw under a microscope when she noticed the Philadelphia drinking water teeming with life. More recently, she has acquired a professional microscope in order to look at nature close-up and discover new forms to use in her art. Informed by her understanding of geometry but judged by eye, these paintings feature fields of radiant dots punctuated by larger circular and quadrilateral shapes that provide rhythmic interplay between background and foreground. These developments add further complexity to works that, symphonic in their structures and rhythms, reveal new variations as the artist advances her exploration of colour and its effects, resonating emotionally, conceptually and perceptually. Meditations on the relationship of form and colour, they make evident her continually evolving practice and approach to the micro and macro; as she notes, ‘I feel like I am a tree with many branches’.
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Works
07Howardena Pindell
Working across figuration, abstraction and conceptualism, Howardena Pindell has since the 1970s examined a wide range of subject matter, from the personal and diaristic to the social and political. Hers is a complex and nuanced body of work, a fusion of sensuality and intellectual enquiry in which texture, colour, structure and process are employed to mine history (and hidden histories) and address intersecting issues such as racism, feminism, violence and exploitation.
Pindell is known for employing unconventional materials such as glitter, talcum powder, even perfume, in her work and for rendering visible traces of labour, such as obsessively affixed dots of pigment and paper circles made with a hole punch, or canvases cut into strips and sewn back together, which signify wider, metaphorical processes of deconstruction and reconstruction.
Trailblazing early works include Video Drawings, shown in the inaugural exhibition at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, which led to a long series of works that feature her drawings superimposed over sporting events, news broadcasts and televised elections; and Free, White and 21, 1980, a video in which the artist plays herself and, wearing a mask, a white woman, whose conversation relays Pindell’s own experiences of racism. Her ravishing, pointillist paintings of the 1970s, created by spraying paint through a template, prefigure what is now regarded as her signature aesthetic, in which colourful paper circles are meticulously affixed to unstretched canvases.
Pindell’s achievements as an artist are equalled by her role as a curator, educator and activist. She was the first black female curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and a co-founder of the pioneering feminist A.I.R. Gallery. In 1979, she began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where she remains a professor.
Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University. After graduating, she accepted a job in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, where she remained for 12 years (1967–1979).
Throughout her career, Pindell has exhibited extensively. Notable solo-exhibitions include: Spelman College (1971, Atlanta), A.I.R. Gallery (1973, 1983, New York), Just Above Midtown (1977, New York), Lerner-Heller Gallery (1980, 1981, New York), The Studio Museum in Harlem (1986, New York), the Wadsworth Atheneum (1989, Hartford), Cyrus Gallery (1989, New York), G.R. N’Namdi Gallery (1992, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2006, Chicago, Detroit, and New York), Garth Greenan Gallery, New York (2014, 2017), and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta (2015). The major touring survey exhibition Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen, opened at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, (24 February–20 May 2018), travelling to Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (25 August–25 November 2018) and Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts (1 February–19 May 2019). In October 2020, the exhibition Howardena Pindell: Rope/Fire/Water will open at The Shed, New York, examining the violent, historical trau
Pindell’s work has been featured in many landmark museum exhibitions, such as: Contemporary Black Artists in America (1971, Whitney Museum of American Art), Rooms (1976, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center), Another Generation (1979, The Studio Museum in Harlem), Afro-American Abstraction (1980, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center), The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990, New Museum of Contemporary Art), and Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African-American Women Artists (1996, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta).
Most recently, Pindell’s work has appeared in: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017, Tate Modern, London; 2018, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; 2018–2019, Brooklyn Museum, New York; 2019, The Broad Museum, Los Angeles), We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 (2017, the Brooklyn Museum, New York), Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980 (2006, The Studio Museum in Harlem), High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975 (2006, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro), WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949–1978 (2009, Seattle Art Museum), Black in the Abstract: Part I, Epistrophy (2013, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston), and Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age (2015–2016, Museum Brandhorst; 2016, Museum Moderner Kunst).
Pindell’s work is in the permanent collections of major museums internationally, including: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Brooklyn Museum; Corcoran Gallery of Art; Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.
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