More than a dozen exhibitions, most in and around London, are showcasing the work of black female artists this summer. As the current far-right and nationalist grip on US politics strengthens, Pindell remains committed to making art that has the capacity to trigger historical memory – and to incite change. As a woman of colour who experienced the pervasive institutional racism of the art world and the women’s movement from the inside, her autobiographical works confronted issues of genocide, HIV/AIDS and human and civil rights from a boldly critical standpoint. Pindell began to confront historical events and address ethical issues through text and representational elements.
WINNING ELEVEN PS1 ABERTURA GUNS N ROSE SERIES
In 1979, however, Pindell’s practice took a sharply political turn following a series of traumatic events that changed her approach to art. While working in the curatorial ranks of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s, Pindell began transforming hole-punched temples of cardstock and manila envelopes into multicoloured constellations of mystifying depth and complexity. You may wake up dead.”īeginning her artistic practice as an academically trained figurative painter in the 1960s, Howardena Pindell’s turn towards abstraction was a challenge to the formalist tradition of Minimalism. Having survived the accident, she developed a dictum for the series, “You never know.
After the accident, she made a conscious decision to create work that was more “viscerally” personal, and felt an urgency to address in her art the appalling omission and underrepresentation of women of color that she had experienced firsthand during the ’60s and ’70s. Prior to her 1979 accident, Pindell was making abstract paintings that were often based on a grid structure and emphasized process to explore nuanced color, light, and movement. They testify to the pivotal roles travel, as well as her investigations into alternative philosophies and religions, played in helping heal her internal and external wounds. Early works from this series on view at Garth Greenan bear witness to the artist literally and figuratively piecing together fragments of her past. The Autobiography series came about after a near fatal crash in which Pindell sustained severe injuries and memory loss. In 1988, Howardena Pindell organized Autobiography: In her Own Image, an exhibition at INTAR Latin American Gallery where she invited 18 women of color artists to present views of themselves “which may not be particularly pleasing to the dominant culture.” She described the work as “neither neutered nor devoid of personal references to gender, race, and class or paradox, conflict, and celebration.” The idea for Pindell’s exhibition came out of her own “Autobiography” series: mixed media works she created between 19, a selection of which are currently featured at Garth Greenan Gallery. “She often looks at how pulp fiction manipulates the clichés of what a woman should be.” The scene is framed by the words: “Sometimes men went crazy from the heat.” “Much of her work has to do with revisiting pulp fiction,” Arriola says of the US artist, who last exhibited this piece nearly 30 years ago at her retrospective in 1991 at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Vultures ominously circle overhead as a weary gold miner, pickaxe slung over his shoulder, leads a bikini-clad woman on a donkey through a desert landscape in this large, mixed-media mural by Alexis Smith. We caught up with the project’s curator Magalí Arriola, the director of Mexico City’s Museo Tamayo and the curator of Mexico’s presentation at the latest Venice Biennale, who pointed out a few highlights on our whistle-stop tour. Art Basel’s Unlimited has long been a favourite at the fair’s Swiss edition and organisers are hoping to replicate some of that magic here in Miami with the launch of Meridians, a new section devoted to performance and large-scale works.
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