THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020 AR 15Art
In more than half a century as an artist,
Howardena Pindell has made many hun-
dreds of paintings and drawings and just
three videos, yet one of those videos is argu-
ably her best-known work. “Free, White and
21” (1980) depicts the artist recounting a lit-
any of racist experiences, from being tied to
a cot by a kindergarten teacher to discrimi-
nation in applying for jobs. Interspersed
among the personal stories, Ms. Pindell ap-
pears as a second character in whiteface
and a blond wig. The white woman tells the
Black narrator that she must be paranoid.
“You won’t exist until we validate you,” she
chides.
“Free, White and 21” is as much a com-
mentary on the pervasiveness of racism in
America as it is on the whiteness of the sec-
ond-wave feminist movement, which Ms.
Pindell knew intimately because she had
been part of it. In 1972, she was the only per-
son of color among 20 cofounding members
of A.I.R., the first nonprofit, artist-run wom-
en’s gallery in the United States. In conver-
sations with her colleagues, she brought up
the injustices she faced as a Black woman,
but they were uninterested, even hostile to
her concerns.
One time, Ms. Pindell presented an idea
for a new artwork that stemmed from a
childhood memory. When she was around 10
or 12, she visited the home of a friend whose
mother was cooking meat. In the living
room the family had an issue of Life maga-
zine. The young Ms. Pindell picked it up and
found inside a photograph of an African-
American man lying on a log. “He was burn-
ing from the inside out,” she said in a recent
video call. He was being lynched as smiling
white men stood around him. “That image
and the smell made it so real that I couldn’t
eat meat for about a year,” she recalled.
At A.I.R., Ms. Pindell proposed reproduc-
ing the photograph while cooking meat in
the gallery: Image and scent would com-
bine to recreate the chilling experience. “I
was the only nonwhite,” she said by way of
explanation. “They turned it down.” She left
the group in 1975.
Her childhood memory is now the start-
ing point for “Rope/Fire/Water,” her first
video in 25 years, commissioned by the
Shed, which reopened this month with her
exhibition of the same name; it also features
five new paintings and 10 older ones, includ-
ing a piece that’s never been displayed pub-
licly. The presentation at the Shed is Ms. Pin-
dell’s first institutional solo exhibition in
New York City, her longtime home, since
- (Her work is also currently on view in
the gallery at Art Omi, a sculpture and archi-
tecture park in Ghent, N.Y., about two hours
north of Manhattan.) “This show is kind of a
culmination of everything,” she reflected.
Although it grew out of a personal story,
“Rope/Fire/Water” is an apt counterpart to
“Free, White and 21,” using data to delve into
lynching, and other brutal attacks on Black
Americans. The artist narrates details while
the screen stays largely black, punctuated
by historical photographs and statistics in
white text. A metronome ticks throughout,
suggesting that when it comes to combating
racism, we are working against the clock.
In the Shed’s gallery, “Rope/Fire/Water”
plays in a semicircular space. To get there,
visitors (limited to 25 percent of capacity)
walk past Ms. Pindell’s paintings, which
sample the breadth of her experimentation.
Of a piece with the video, two new commis-
sions are all black and covered with words
that reference episodes of racist violence;
both have objects, including burned toys,
laid out before them as if they were altars.
Nearby, a pair of shaped works combine text
and figurative imagery into collagelike com-
mentaries on slavery. Then there are the ab-
stract pieces. The ones from the 1970s are
muted, unstretched canvases dotted with
circular chads produced by hole punchers.
The recent examples are eruptions of chads,
other foam shapes, color and glitter, with
mazelike networks of sewn lines. They feel
simultaneously detailed and expansive, like
maps of discrete universes.
“This is an emotionally charged show, but
I hope people are able to see the beauty of
her practice, because it’s such an important
part of what she does,” Adeze Wilford, an as-
sistant curator at the Shed and the organizer
of the exhibition, said. “She is this activist,
but she also has this gorgeous, canvas-pro-
ducing side that I felt needed to be shown in
the same context.”
The career of Ms. Pindell, 77, is filled with
such dualities. She has used her work to con-
front pain and embrace pleasure, spent dec-
ades committed to both figuration and ab-
straction, worked in institutions and criti-
cized them.
“She’s always sat in her truth,” said Va-
lerie Cassel Oliver, who co-curated the first
major survey of Ms. Pindell’s work, in 2018.
“She has been brave, even when it hasn’t
been popular. It comes from a space of want-
ing to make a difference.”
Ms. Pindell was born in Philadelphia in- Her parents encouraged an early in-
terest in art by taking her to meet artists and
visit museums and, when she grew older,
supported her as she pursued a B.F.A. from
Boston University (1961-65), where the
training was strictly figurative, and an
M.F.A. from Yale (1965-67), whose more
avant-garde program helped spur her to
transition into abstraction.
From the beginning, Ms. Pindell was
drawn to the form of the circle, which she
had “experienced as a scary thing,” she said.
As a child, she and her father had gone to a
root beer stand, where she noticed red dots
affixed to the bottoms of their mugs. The
symbol “designated that the glassware
could be used by nonwhites,” she explained.
“Whites would not use the same utensils.”
She became fixated on the shape, and
putting it in her art allowed her to reclaim it.
“I get great pleasure out of punching holes,”
she told me with a laugh.
In 1971, Ms. Pindell showed in a major mu-
seum for the first time, in a group exhibition
at the Whitney. She was then working at the
Museum of Modern Art, where she started
as an assistant, and rose to associate curator
— the first Black woman curator at the insti-
tution. She also joined the push to unionize
MoMA.
“We went on strike twice,” she recalled,
“but I ran into something quite annoying.”
When white feminists came to protest gen-
der inequality at the museum, they “called
me up in my office and said, ‘You have to
come down and picket with us.’
“I said: ‘No, this is my day job. I don’t have
a husband paying my bills.’ And they kind of
resented that. Yet when there was anything
that involved Black women, they were no-
where to be found.”
Her sense of alienation increased in 1979,
when controversy erupted over an exhibi-
tion at the downtown nonprofit Artists
Space. A white artist named Donald New-
man used the N-word in the title of his solo
show there. Ms. Pindell was among a group
of art workers who protested, holding a sit-
in at the gallery. But many others defended
Mr. Newman’s right to free speech. “The
general attitude was if you criticize a white
male artist, that’s censorship,” Ms. Pindell
said.
By this time, she was feeling stuck in what
she calls “a lose-lose situation.” Some Black
artists had criticized her for pursuing ab-
straction, rather than figurative work in the
vein of the Black Arts Movement; they were
also mad that she hadn’t “flung the doors
open of the museum,” she said. Meanwhile,
“the whites were angry that I was there,”
working at such a prestigious institution as
MoMA. “They thought I didn’t belong.”
She decided to quit to focus on making
and teaching art. In 1979, she was hired as
an associate professor at Stony Brook Uni-
versity, but soon after, she and a colleague
were in a car accident that left her with inju-ries and short-term memory loss. It proved
to be a watershed moment in her practice. “I
remember thinking, if I could have died so
quickly, I would never have expressed my
opinion,” she said. “That started me looking
at my life again and thinking about what I
felt about the world.”
Ms. Pindell began using her work as a
means of healing. She cut out parts of the
canvas and sewed them back in — a sym-
bolic suturing of the damage that had been
done. She incorporated images of her body
and pictures of places she’d visited into her
abstract process, creating a hybrid style
that mapped the associative nature of mem-
ory. She assembled fragmented, fish-eye
forms by taking postcards, slicing them into
strips, and painting in between. Many of
these pieces belong to her “Autobiography”
series, which began with “Free, White and
21.” And as that video prefigures, her art be-
came more expressly political, with person-
al issues crossing over into societal ones.
Ms. Pindell spent a lot of time by herself in
those years. “I kind of self-isolated,” she
said. Yet she continued her activism, writing
anonymous letters about racism to institu-
tions and individuals and signing them “The
Black Hornet.” She undertook two major
demographic surveys of museum exhibi-
tions and gallery rosters in New York City,
finding that white artists dominated. “As a
result of the closed nepotistic interlocking
network, artists of color face an industry-
wide ‘restraint of trade,’ ” she wrote in a pa-
per delivered at Hunter College in 1987.
She showed regularly across the United
States and abroad but struggled to find deal-
ers she could trust. White critics dismissed
both her abstract and issue-driven work.
She recalled one review in which the writer
said he wanted to have sex under her paint-
ings.
As happens with so many artists of color
and women, however, the market and major
institutions have increasingly embraced her
as she’s gotten older. She joined Garth
Greenan Gallery in 2012 and then had a solo
show there, her first in New York City in al-
most a decade. Two years ago, her retro-
spective opened to critical acclaim. “You
could get a very big head from the kind of
recognition I’m getting,” she joked.
But Ms. Pindell, who is generous and
easygoing, has not. When we had our call,
she sat in an office overflowing with files
and boxes: She was in the midst of organ-
izing her papers, which are going to be ac-
quired by the Smithsonian Archives of
American Art. She uses a walker now and
has problems with her memory, although for
the most part, her stories came easily; she
even remembered the names of old co-work-
ers at MoMA.
“Every day I live, I seem to forget all that
I’ve done, and I’m amazed when I think
about it,” she said. “I don’t know how I did it.
I really don’t. I mean, I don’t know how I sur-
vived.”She’s Still Telling
Her Deep Truths
Howardena Pindell’s first video in 25 years mines
the history of violence against Black Americans.
By JILLIAN STEINHAUERHOWARDENA PINDELL AND GARTH GREENAN GALLERYHOWARDENA PINDELL AND THE SHEDHOWARDENA PINDELL AND GARTH GREENAN GALLERYHOWARDENA PINDELL; GARTH GREENAN GALLERY
AND VICTORIA MIRO GALLERYAbove, Howardena
Pindell at her home
studio in the Inwood
section of Manhattan.
Her exhibition at the
Shed in Hudson Yards
includes a new video,
“Rope/Fire/Water,”
along with five new
paintings and 10 older
ones. At top from left
are burnt toys made
to sit in front of her
“Four Little Girls,” and
“Untitled #20,” 1974,
an example of her
early abstract work.
At center left is an
image of a ship from
“Rope/Fire/Water,” a
film the artist has
been wanting to make
for 50 years. The ship
resembles one that
would have been used
for the Middle Passage.
Center right, “Plankton
Lace #1,” 2020, is a
work commissioned by
the Shed, and was
inspired by viewing an
American Museum of
Natural History
exhibition on plankton.DEVIN OKTAR YALKIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES.