Howardena Pindell (1946- )

Howardena Pindell is an artist, educator, and curator, leaving influences on the art world as a female African American figure. Trained as a painter, Pindell challenges the tradition of painting using various materials and mediums in composing her works. Using non-traditional materials in her paintings, she allows the paintings to develop out of the flat surface and to fall free and drop without being confined by stretcher support. After arriving in New York after competing for MFA at Yale University, Pindell’s approaches changed drastically. She became more aware of Black Power and feminist movements. She engaged with artists, activists, and feminists and was socially active as a member of the A.I.R. Gallery. In 1979, Pindell experienced a car accident, leaving a short-term amnesia. From this point forward, Pindell’s experimentation moves beyond materiality and engages with different content that constitutes the stories within her art. She uses postcards and photographs, cuts them into pieces, and reconstructed them back into the form of paintings.

ntitled (1998) marks the early periods of Howardena Pindell’s artistic career. While experimenting with various ways of approaching art, Pindell started to lay pieces of paper on the small television and traces the action of each line and dot using arrows and number labels. In this work, the small arrows with number labels near the corner show the particular action of the scene Pindell was tracing through. The repetition of the lines indicates the edges of the scene and its movement between seconds. Untitled shows the amount of physical dedication and the detailed tracing of each movement. It incorporates both the painterly effects through the drawing lines, which became a scene in itself, and leaves spaces for audiences to imagine and guess what the original television screen was showcasing.

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