Howardena Pindell is an African American visual artist born April 4, 1943, in Philadelphia. She is currently a professor in the Department of Art at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Pindell was a visiting professor at the Yale University School of Art from 1995 to 1999. From 1967 to 1979, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York , including as associate curator of prints and illustrated books. Pindell earned a BFA from the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1965, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1967, and has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York. In addition to residing in New York, she has lived in Sweden, Japan, and India.[1]
Pindell decided to become an artist at the age of eight, attending Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia for drawing classes, as well as Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, and the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts), before she graduated from high school at sixteen. The first exhibit of her art took place at Pindell’s neighborhood Black Presbyterian church. She also spent time at the Philadelphia Museum of Art looking at works from the Arensberg Collection and by Marcel Duchamp.[2]
Pindell began as an oil painter but developed an allergy due to the overuse of lead white. Her art hewed more closely to her life as the artist’s career evolved. She states, “My work was primarily about process until a freak car accident in 1979. After that my work became autobiographical as part of my desperate struggle to heal myself.”[3] Her major themes include liberation, feminism, and the Black female experience. Art historian Celeste-Marie Bernier has noted that Pindell “pushes the boundaries of aesthetic experimentation in her large-scale, full-colour, mixed-media collages, videos and installations to [visualize] powerful histories of [B]lack female subjugation, exploitation, and sexual abuse.”[4]
In her work, Pindell transforms the body into a monument to tell narratives of intersectional discrimination. Her own blood appears on the canvas in Autobiography: Air/CS560 (1988). An outline of Pindell’s body in Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts (1988) is surrounded by fragmented body parts floating in the sea as a means to memorialize violence against Black bodies, specifically those of Black women during the Middle Passage. This work also includes text from a North Carolina slave law and an obscured line that reads “SEPARATE BUT EQUAL'' to signify the relationship between white supremacy and Black bodies.[5]
PMA Collection
PMA Library
PMA Archive
References
Bernier, Celeste-Marie. 2008. African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Pindell, Howardena. 2001. “Over Time: A Forum on Art Making.” In M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory, and Criticism, edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dziedzic, Erin, and Melissa Messina. 2017. Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today. Kansas City, MO: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
“Howardena Pindell: Department of Art.” Stony Brook University. Accessed December 15, 2020. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/art/people/faculty-staff/howardena-pindell.php.
Endnotes
[1] Dziedzic and Messina 2017; Pindell 2001; Stony Brook University n.d.
[2] Pindell 2001.
[3] Ibid., 243.
[4] Bernier 2008, 204.
[5] Ibid.
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