Howardena Pindell

Howardena Pindell was born on April 14, 1943, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was raised in the neighborhood of Germantown. Her parents were Mildred (née Lewis) and Howard Douglas Pindell; she was an only child. She graduated from the Philadelphia High School for Girls, where she acted and designed scenes for the school's stage play. From a young age, she demonstrated promise in figurative art classes at the Philadelphia College of Art, the Fleisher Art Memorial, and the Tyler School of Art. She received her BFA degree in 1965 from Boston University, and her MFA degree in 1967 from Yale University. Pindell had studied color theory under Sewell Sillman. == Career ==

In 1967, Pindell began working in the Arts Education Department at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. In 1969, Pindell gained recognition for her participation in the exhibition American Drawing Biennial XXIII at the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, and by 1972, had her first major exhibition at Spelman College in Atlanta. As MoMA's associate curator, Pindell would spend nights creating her own pieces, drawing inspiration from many of the exhibits hosted at the museum (especially Akan batakari tunics of the museum's African Textiles and Decorative Arts exhibit). In 1972, Pindell co-founded the A.I.R. Gallery, which was the first artist-directed gallery for women artists in the United States. There were twenty artist cofounders, including Nancy Spero, Agnes Denes, Barbara Zucker, Dotty Attie, Judith Bernstein, Harmony Hammond, Maude Boltz, Louise Kramer, and others. The artists ultimately chose the name "A.I.R. Gallery", the initials standing for "Artists in Residence". Pindell is currently a professor of art at Stony Brook University, where she has taught since 1979. She was also visiting professor in the Art department of Yale University, from 1995 to 1999. In 2024, White Cube sold Pindell's "Untitled, 1975" for $1.75 million at Art Basel Paris. From November 20, 2024, to January 8, 2025, White Cube Hong Kong will host a one-person show of Pindell's new paintings. == Art criticism and critiques of the art world ==

Pindell is notable for releasing several articles criticizing diversity of representation within the visual art industry. In 1978, she commented on her travels throughout Nigeria in 1973, to where she witnessed a gendered divide between artists. She argued that the lack of female artists was a product of economic and cultural pressures that make female artistic presence a rarity in the nation. In 1988, Pindell documented the racial makeup of artist representations in New York City. She noted that at most 12% of artists (in both the private and public sector) were nonwhite during the 1986/1987 New York City exhibition season. While working at MoMA, Pindell created a statistical report, featured in the March 1989 issue of ARTnews. This report spanned seven years, where she surveyed art institutions and galleries in New York State that featured Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American artists and designers. In January 2020, Pindell filed a lawsuit against the G. R. N’Namdi Gallery. Pindell has cited discrimination against Black artists as a contributing factor to fiduciary manipulation, joining Al Herbert and Herbert Gentry as a group of artists who have expressed difficulties working with the N'Namdi family. ==Artistic style ==

Federal Building, Queens, New York. The work is acrylic, paper, and gouache on canvas. Following her graduation from the MFA program specializing in painting at Yale University in 1967, Pindell moved to New York City. From working with dots, Pindell began making use of the scrap circles of oak tag paper that resulted from the production of her pointillist works. David Bourdon writes: "By 1974, Pindell developed a more three-dimensional and more personal form of pointillism, wielding a paper punch to cut out multitudes of confetti-like disks, which she dispersed with varying degrees of premeditation and randomness over the surfaces of her pictures." One example of this is a 17 x 90 inch, untitled drawing-collage from 1973; Pindell used more than 20 thousand hand-numbered paper dots to form vertical and horizontal rows with rhythmic peacefulness, uniting order and chaos. In 1973, her work with circles received acclaim at a show in the A.I.R. Gallery in SoHo, where her style had solidified into expression through "large-scale, untitled, nonrepresentational, abstract paintings". Because of this, Pindell experienced the circle as "a scary thing" and the shape preoccupied her as an artist. Experimenting with circles in pieces such as Untitled #3C actually enabled her to repair her relationship with the shape, as she told the New York Times: “I get great pleasure out of punching holes.” Pindell also began work on her "Video Drawings" series in 1983. At the advice of her doctor, Pindell bought a television for her studio to encourage her from working long hours on her dot works. She became fascinated by African sculpture exhibited at MoMA and in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and began to mirror the practice of encoding and accumulation in her own work. It was at this point that her work became much more autobiographical, in part as an effort to help herself heal. Her painting Autobiography (which was part of an eight-painting series on her recovery), used Pindell's own body as the focal point. For this piece, she cut and sewed a traced outline of herself onto a large piece of canvas as part of a complex collage. In 1980, she made a video called Free, White, and 21, in which she appears in a blonde wig, dark glasses, and with a pale stocking over her head, appearing as a caricature of a white woman. "You really must be paranoid," Pindell says, performing as the white woman, "I have never had experiences like that. But, of course, I am free, white and 21." Pindell engages in a satirical critique, discussing instances of racism that she has experienced throughout her life. She asserted that the "white feminist who wishes equality for herself too often remains a racist in her 'equality. From this vantage point, Pindell began expending a particular focus on racism in the art world, a subject on which she has published multiple writings. In 1980, she openly addressed the persistent presence of racism within the feminist movement, organizing a show at the A.I.R. Gallery titled The Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the US. She became increasingly aware that she had often been selected for exhibition as a token black among a group of other artists. She and Carolyn Martin cofounded a cross-generational black women's artist collective called Entitled: Black Women Artists that has since grown to international membership, likely due to Pindell's consistent travel and lecturing. Pindell's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou. Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). ==Awards==

Pindell has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting in 1987, the Most Distinguished Body of Work or Performance Award, granted by the College Art Association in 1990, the Studio Museum of Harlem Artist Award, the Distinguished Contribution to the Profession Award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 1996, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a United States Artists fellowship in 2020. She also holds honorary doctorates from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Parsons The New School for Design. ==Collections==

• Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York • Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York • Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. • High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia • Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. • Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois • National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. • Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut == References ==