Pindell in her studio at Westbeth Artists Housing with Untitled (1968 -1970) Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery

Howardena Pindell
Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery

“When the 82-year-old artist Howardena Pindell was a child, she saw herself in the face of a mummy. This was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the late 1940s or early 1950s — she can’t quite remember the year. But she clearly recalls the painting, an eerily naturalistic Fayum portrait from Roman Egypt, which was made while the subject was still alive to preserve her face. It was the first time Pindell, young and Black in a segregated city, saw her resemblance in a museum. Perhaps as she stared at this person — nearly two millenniums old — who looked so much like her, she felt the years between them briefly collapse. Since then, she’s made a practice of reshuffling time, and refracting her own likeness, in her art.
Pindell has a charged relationship to memory. In 1979, she survived a life-threatening car accident that left her with memory loss. By that point, she was about a decade into her career as an abstract, pointillist artist known for her colorful, large-scale “Spray Dot” paintings, and she’d just left the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she’d made history (and endured racism) as the museum’s first Black woman curator. After the accident, Pindell started making art that grappled with her fragmented identity, incorporating the silhouette of her own body and scraps of personal mementos into sprawling collages. Often, these works were also embedded with what she calls her “premonitions” — symbols, figures and text that seemed to predict experiences that Pindell hadn’t had yet. She also made “Free, White and 21” (1980), her first video piece and perhaps her most famous work to date. In it, the artist looks directly at the camera with an impassive stare while recounting a litany of racist encounters from when she was a child, a student at Boston University and a recent graduate of Yale’s MFA program looking for work in New York City. She also appears in whiteface, as a darkly comic avatar for those who had so frequently discounted her experiences.

Read the entire interview HERE NYT HOWARDENA PINDELL

Westbeth 1970 Poster: Signatures of original tenants

Signature of Howardena Pindell on 1970 poster