Howardena Pindell

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce a selection of mixed media works by Howardena Pindell, all made between 2021 and 2022. Opening Thursday, September 15, 2022, the exhibition will feature several recent paintings, as well as a selection of works on paper from her recent residency at Dieu Donné. A catalog, jointly published by Garth Greenan Gallery and Dieu Donné, will accompany the exhibition.

Untitled #7 (Carnival, Bahia, Brazil) (2022), like many of Pindell’s cut and sewn paintings of the last decade, is a celebration of color. Though the painting is unified by an expanse of fiery magenta, the saturated color of buried forms penetrates the monochromatic paint. Pindell’s iconic punched paper dots grace the surface with raw bursts of vivid color. The monumental work marks the artist’s return to the grid—a theme of particular interest to Pindell in the ’70s. The thick underlying surface occasionally ruptures, revealing the matrix of cut and sewn canvas below.

Pindell’s works produced during her recent paper making residency at Dieu Donné parallel the larger paintings—revisiting themes and techniques with renewed creativity and excitement that the artist first explored in the ’70s. Just as she deconstructs and reconstructs canvases through cutting and sewing, Pindell has embraced papermaking techniques as a way of circumventing the conventional treatment of the material as a two-dimensional surface, enabling an interplay of fore- and background, between subject and media. In Untitled #47 (2021), for example, Pindell meticulously places numbered chads into an embedded grid, layering translucent abaca paper on top, burying the chads into the surface as she often does in her dense painted surfaces.

Like her cut and sewn works, Pindell’s handmade papers take on new forms, suggesting new, idiosyncratic logical structures. In Untitled #21 (2021), the artist stencils layers of numerical symbols onto a loosely circular cotton paper. Each layer of numbers is, on its own, orderly, conforming to a uniform grid. But Pindell resets each layer with its own grid, scale, and color. Their legibility as number sets deteriorates, forming a mesmerizing dance of pattern and color.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University School of Art and Architecture. After graduating, she accepted a position at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she worked for 12 years (1967–1979). She held the role of Exhibition Assistant in the Department of Circulating National and International Exhibitions, before transitioning to the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, where she worked as a Curatorial Assistant, Assistant Curator, and finally as the Associate Curator and Acting Director. In 1979, she began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where she is now a Distinguished Professor of Art.

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), Wadsworth Atheneum (1989, Hartford), Cyrus Gallery (1989, New York), G.R. N’Namdi Gallery (1992, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2006, Chicago, Detroit, and New York), Garth Greenan Gallery (2014, 2017, 2019, New York), and Victoria Miro (2019, London).

Her work has also featured in many landmark museum exhibitions, such as Contemporary Black Artists in America (1971, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), Rooms (1976, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York), Another Generation (1979, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York), Afro-American Abstraction (1980, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York), 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, Seattle), Black in the Abstract: Part I, Epistrophy (2013, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston), We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 (2017–2018, Brooklyn Museum, New York; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston), Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction (2017–2018, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida), Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950–1980 (2017–2018, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017–2019, Tate Modern, London; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Brooklyn Museum, New York), and Outliers and American Vanguard Art (2018–2019, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles). In 2018, Pindell was the subject of a major retrospective, Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen, which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and traveled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, through 2019.

The major traveling exhibition Howardena Pindell: A New Language, which opened at Fruitmarket (November 13, 2021–May 2, 2022, Edinburgh, UK), is currently on view at Kettle’s Yard (July 2–October 30, 2022, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK), and will travel to both Spike Island (February 3–May 7, 2023, Bristol, UK) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (June 29–November 5, 2023, Dublin, Ireland).

Howardena Pindell is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. In 2019, she was awarded the Archives of American Art Medal by the Smithsonian Institution, the Artist Legacy Foundation 2019 Award, and the College Art Association 2019 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement.

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, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; 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, Richmond; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Howardena Pindell.