Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Howardena Pindell: Recent Paintings, an exhibition of mixed media-paintings at 545 West 20th Street. Opening on Thursday, October 26, 2017, the exhibition is the artist’s second with the gallery. Not since 2006, however, has Pindell’s recent work been displayed in a commercial setting. Six of the artist’s large-scale abstract paintings will be on view, all created between 2014 and 2017. The exhibition opens in advance of Pindell’s upcoming retrospective, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (February 24–May 20, 2018), curated by Naomi Beckwith and Valerie Cassel Oliver.

The exhibition offers a detailed view of Pindell’s recent work, covering an innovative time for the artist in which, after a long hiatus, she reengaged with abstraction. In paintings such as Nautilus I (2014–2015) and Night Flight (2015–2016), Pindell continues a metaphorical process first begun in the mid-1970s. She deconstructs/reconstructs her work, cutting the canvas into complex “maze patterns” and sewing them back together, then building up the surface in elaborate stages: painting or drawing onto a sheet of paper, punching out dots from it, dropping them onto her canvas, and finally squeegeeing acrylic through the “stencil” left in the paper from which she had punched the dots. Recently, sequins, glitter, foam circles, vinyl text, powder, string, printed numbers, and even hair have become part of the artist’s labor-intensive, process-oriented approach to painting. As always, her constructed canvases are installed unstretched, held to the wall merely by the strength of a few finishing nails.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University. After graduating, she accepted a job in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, where she remained for 12 years (1967–1979). In 1979, she began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where she is now a full professor. Throughout her career, Pindell has exhibited extensively. Notable solo exhibitions include Spelman College (1971, 2015, Atlanta), A.I.R. Gallery (1973, 1983, New York), Just Above Midtown (1977, New York), Lerner-Heller Gallery (1980, 1981, New York), The Studio Museum in Harlem (1986, New York), the Wadsworth Atheneum (1989, Hartford), Cyrus Gallery (1989, New York), and G.R. N’Namdi Gallery (1992, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2006, Chicago, Detroit, and New York).

Her work has also been featured in many landmark museum exhibitions, such as Contemporary Black Artists in America (1971, Whitney Museum of American Art), Rooms (1976, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center), Another Generation (1979, The Studio Museum in Harlem), Afro-American Abstraction (1980, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center), The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York), Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African-American Women Artists (1996, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta), Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980 (2006, The Studio Museum in Harlem), High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975 (2006, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro), WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949–1978 (2009, Seattle Art Museum), and Black in the Abstract: Part I, Epistrophy (2013, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston).

Currently, major paintings by Pindell are included in the Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 (now at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, 2017–2018; traveling to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2018), the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art's Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction (now at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., 2017–2018; traveling to Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2018), the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950–1980 (2017–2018, New York), and the Tate Modern's Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017, London; traveling to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2018; Brooklyn Museum, 2018–2019). Her work will also figure prominently in Lynne Cooke’s Outliers and American Vanguard Art, opening at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in January 2018. 

Pindell’s work is in the permanent collections of major museums internationally, including the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; the Wadsworth Atheneum; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Howardena Pindell.

Howardena Pindell: Recent Paintings will be on view at Garth Greenan Gallery, 545 West 20th Street (between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues), through Thursday, December 21, 2017. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. For more information, please contact the gallery at (212) 929-1351, or email info@garthgreenan.com.