Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen

Trained as a painter, Pindell has challenged the staid traditions of the art world and asserted her place in its history as a woman and one of African descent. Since the 1960s, she has used materials such as glitter, talcum powder, and perfume to stretch the boundaries of the rigid tradition of rectangular, canvas painting. She has also infused her work with traces of her labor, obsessively generating paper dots with an ordinary hole punch and affixing the pigmented chads onto the surfaces of her paintings. Despite the effort exerted in the creation of these works, Pindell’s use of rich colors and unconventional materials gives the finished paintings a sumptuous and ethereal quality.

The exhibition also highlights Pindell’s work with photography, film, and performance, media she has used to explore her place in the world. Her chance-based experiments include photographing her drawings juxtaposed over a television screen, as well as creating Free, White and 21 (1980), a performance for film based on her personal experiences of racism. The exhibition also includes Pindell’s most recent works from the last two years, which draw on the beauty and innovation of her approach to abstraction to build upon contemporary conversations around equity and diversity.