THE SKINNY
A Circle Has No End Art
Howardena Pindell’s exhibition at Fruitmarket brings together her diverse body of work for her first major UK solo show. Here she gives an insight into her studio practice, and the last 60 years of making social change as an artist and activist Interview: Adam Benmakhlouf
the textural work as well as the issue-related work. I love to do research. In the outside studio, I do the non-figurative works, the large works. I have assistants, also. At 78 or 79, I don’t have the strength of a 30-year-old… [I’ve] been revisiting in recent times the early spray dot works on a large scale. There’s plenty of room in the [outside] studio. I find the textural works very calming to produce.” These are the stunning abstract paintings that are often what might come up first when researching Pindell’s work. These are also notable in the way that Pindell works with the cloth of the canvas, without attaching it to wooden stretchers. “I love working on unstretched canvas, I love the free floating material. It feels large and less cumbersome without stretchers. My first abstract pieces were all unstretched or in some cases they were later stretched.” These aren’t only unusual works for what the paint was being applied to (the unstretched canvas), but also how Pindell would paint with specialist equipment. “I worked using an atomiser, which is hard to explain because it’s an art supply that I don’t think is sold now. You had a spray can and it had a little attachment that you could put on maybe an eight-ounce bottle of acrylic with a water tension breaker, then you would just slowly
spray through the templates which I made by taking file folders and cutting them in strips, because way back in the 70s you couldn’t get a hole-puncher that would go all the way in if you had too large a strip. Then I would glue them together, and I’d put a skirt of plastic around them so they wouldn’t create an edge.” Pindell’s concept-driven works are in contrast to her large scale abstract and textural works. Pindell brings up the work Columbus (2020) as an instance of one of the issue-related works. It’s mixed media on canvas, made up of text on a black background of traced hands that have been cut out and applied to the canvas with black acrylic paint. It relays the untaught histories of Columbus, whose status as a heroic explorer is only just beginning to be questioned in mainstream education. [TW: The rest of this paragraph and the next refer to deeply disturbing racialised violence.] In this work, Pindell in no uncertain terms details the atrocities committed by Columbus, and under his command, including ‘LYNCHING OF FIRST NATIONS/ PEOPLE, TAKING BODY/ PARTS AS TROPHIES’. Columbus ‘TRAINED DOGS TO EAT HUMAN FLESH/ GRILLED INDIGENOUS PEOPLE ALIVE. DISMEMBERED INFANTS, FEEDING THEM TO THE DOGS’. The text in Columbus is all-caps, emblazoned, Photo: Tom Nolan
December 2021 — Feature
O
ne evening in November, in the midst of preparing for some of the most prestigious art festivals in the world, and keeping pace with the incredible demand for her work, Howardena Pindell spares 40 minutes to answer 11 in-depth questions about her practice, career and life. At 78, she has for six decades been dedicatedly making work for which she has received international renown and attention, forging a new path for herself as an African American woman in white-dominated art contexts. Throughout her career, she has made paintings about war, Apartheid, police violence, the AIDS crisis, slavery and the environment. Pindell’s diverse body of work stems from research (which she loves to do), daring experimentation and the pursuit of beauty. Her home city is New York and throughout the interview, there are the sounds of the city as accompaniment. “I apologise for the background noise,” she says “I’m on the first floor so a lot of people swoop through here on Saturday night on their motorcycles and souped-up cars.” It’s late in the day, and she addresses each of the questions with a spirit of generosity and intellectual elegance. Pindell’s output can at times be textual, with references to history and politics writ large, while others shift the emphasis to material, form colour and texture. By way of a general introduction to the different registers on which her works operate, Pindell draws a distinction between issue-based artworks and others that reflect on and express concepts of beauty. “My work talks back and forth to itself. The issue-related work can be heavy and depressing. The textural and colourful work is a pleasure to the senses, in making it and seeing it. I have two studio spaces – in the home studio I do
“I would like to forget all these microaggressions, but they still linger in my memory”
Howardena Pindell - A New Language, Fruitmarket
— 56 —
