Coming up with innovative textures is something that creative minds from a variety of fields aim for, from fashion designers to videogame developers, and, obviously, artists.
Howardena Pindell has been doing so throughout her career, animating her canvases with stencilled dots or tiny, hole-punched layered and collaged paper discs. At times these confetti-like configurations integrate delicate sequins coated in paint and watercolour or sprinkled with glitter or baby powder across the surface to create visual feasts of colour and light.
In one of her untitled drawings-collages from 1973, Pindell used over 20 thousand hand-numbered paper dots. As she stated in interviews, writing numbers for her is like drawing and, we may add, it is also something that connects her with her childhood as her father was a mathematician. Reminiscent of pointillism, these constellations of dots created a dense and rich surface, but also represent a symbolic landscape.
The circle, a perfect shape that calls to mind the sun, the moon and the Earth, is actually linked in her practice to a memory from her childhood when she drank root beer with her dad in Ohio. During segregation it was court-mandated that dishes and silverware had to be designated whether someone of colour could use them, and the dot in her practice hints at the red circle under mugs seen in that occasion. Quite often Pindell's life inspired the themes and techniques for her artworks.
Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Pindell was already into art as a young child and received her BFA from Boston University in 1965 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1967. She then went on to work as assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
MoMA's first African American curator, while working at the museum, Pindell continued to produce art at night, often getting inspired from the pieces included in the museum's collections and exhibitions, such as the Akan batakari tunics in the exhibit African Textiles and Decorative Arts.
Yet, while working for the museum, Pindell experienced gender and racial biases and eventually left her job. In 1972, Pindell she co-founded the A.I.R. Gallery, which was the first artist-directed gallery for women artists in the United States.
A year later she showed her works with circles at the A.I.R. (Artists-In-Residence) Gallery in SoHo. Around the same time Pindell began work on her "Video Drawings" series. Inspired by the artificial light from her television monitor, she wrote small numerals on acetate, which she stuck to the TV screen. She then photographed her drawings placed over the monitor.
After a car accident, Pindell suffered severe memory loss and, to put together traces of her past, she started integrating fragments of photographs and postcards of familiar places into her paintings. Apart from working as a memoirist, Pindell also turned into an activist: after her accident she started producing more political works that addressed a variety of themes including racism, slavery, violence, child abuse, marginalization, exploitation, feminism, homelessness, wars in Cambodia, Vietnam and the Sudan and the Aids crisis.
In 1980 she made a ground-breaking video called "Free, White, and 21", a conversation between herself and her own caricature of a white woman, to address the difficulties faced by non-white women artists in a space dominated by white women.
Her most recent video "Rope/Fire/Water" (2019) was inspired by George Floyd's murder and by a lynching photo she saw as a child on Life magazine. The video looks at slavery and the civil rights movement and includes Martin Luther King's words of warning: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere".
Pandell's dotted abstractions are not politically engaged, but her abstract works remain iconically mesmerising for their texture and three-dimensionality (also from a fashion point of view - they are indeed extremely inspiring to create inovative surfaces in a variety of creative fields), even though they weren't often appreciated.
As she often highlights in interviews, abstract artists within the African-American community were considered the enemy pandering to the white world; white dealers would instead say that African-Americans who did abstract work were inauthentic.
Pandell also used her dotted abstractions for her large-scale grid-like canvases: her work "Untitled #24", for example, seen from a distance looks totally white, but a close up reveals to the viewer that the canvas is cut into squares stitched together and covered in dots, sequins, and glitter.
The richly textured canvas is currently available from Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale, opening today in New York, and you wonder if this piece will be bought by an art collector or will catch the eye of any fashion designer passionate about surfaces, textures and three-dimensional effects.
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