CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- Kettle’s Yard opened a major solo exhibition of Howardena Pindell (b. 1943, Philadelphia) spanning the artist’s six-decade career and including paintings, works on paper and video. ‘A New Language' traces the development of Pindell’s experiments in artistic form, and examine her work as exemplary in articulating empowerment and responding to racism from the 1970s to the present day.

‘A New Language’ is Pindell’s first solo institutional exhibition in the UK, organised by the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh in collaboration with Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Spike Island, Bristol.

The exhibition takes its title from a text by the artist; writing in A Documentation, 1980-1988, Pindell declared, “I am an artist. I am not part of a so-called ‘minority’, ‘new’ or ‘emerging’ or ‘a new audience’. These are all terms used to demean, limit, and make people of color appear to be powerless. We must evolve a new language which empowers us and does not cause us to participate in our own disenfranchisement.”

Pindell studied art at Boston and Yale Universities before starting her career at MoMA, New York, in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books. The first Black woman on the museum’s curatorial staff, she worked there for twelve years before resigning in 1979 in protest against widespread industry reluctance to condemn Donald Newman’s Artists Space exhibition ‘The N***er Drawings’. Pindell was a founding member of A.I.R (Artists in Residence), the first women’s cooperative gallery in New York, which launched in 1972.




The exhibition opens with a group of works showing the abstract artistic language developed by Pindell in the late 1960s and early 1970s, one that focused on the circle, the grid and use of repetition. Pindell pioneered several techniques over this period, including spraypainting layers of paint through stencils to create haze effects on large canvases, as well as accumulating thick layers of acrylic on unstretched canvases which were nailed directly to walls. Predominantly white and cream, it was this latter series that saw Pindell begin to affix paper chads – remainders from the holes punched to create the stencils – directly to the surface of her work. Increasingly Pindell allowed other non-conventional materials – hair, thread, glitter and perfume – to fix on the surface of these works, challenging dominant contemporary styles like hard-edged abstraction and minimalism in favour of texture and sensuality.

In addition to these abstract paintings, the exhibition includes works on paper from this period. These works range from experiments with sequential numbering on graph paper to diaphanous tracing paper assemblages and ‘chad’ collages. Although these works are abstract, Pindell has explained how the numbers, circles and text fragments have personal and social resonance. She has connected her repeated use of the circle to a circular mark used to denote glasses and tableware for Black patrons at restaurants she encountered in the segregated Southern states as a child.

During her time at MoMA Pindell promoted the work of artists of colour and women artists, serving on the museum’s Byers Committee to investigate racial exclusion in acquisitions and exhibitions. This activism became difficult to sustain as Pindell faced criticism from colleagues struggling to make – or resistant to – change, as well as artists of colour outside the museum who fought for quicker and more meaningful change. Her commitment to abstraction throughout the 1970s also meant her work was often deemed unpolitical, at a time when figuration and explicit engagement with anti-racism were favoured by both the Black Arts Movement and the white establishment. Following a car accident in 1979, Pindell began to bring her own story into her work, incorporating figuration for the first time to help regain memories lost due to a head injury. She developed a sense of social and political urgency, and a conviction that the pressures, prejudices and exclusions she faced as a Black artist and as a woman needed to be part of her art.

Pindell’s important video work from this period, Free, White and 21 (1980), is being shown. The work is a dialogue manque between Pindell and a white feminist, who the artist also plays, in which Pindell describes instances of racist violence that the white feminist first disputes and then aggressively dismisses. Made for the landmark exhibition ‘Dialectics of Isolation: Third World Women Artists’ at A.I.R. Gallery, the work powerfully decries the inequalities of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Another video work, Rope, Fire, Water, is also being shown. Though it was conceived at the same time as Free, White and 21, Pindell could not find the support to make Rope, Fire, Water until 2020. The video is a meditation on racialised violence in the United States, connecting the brutalities of enslavement with torture committed in Jim Crow states and police violence in the present day. Made in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the video ends with an elegiac appeal to remember those killed through racialised violence.

The exhibition also presents two important strains in Pindell’s later practice, her memorial works and her shaped abstract canvases. Columbus (2020), a mixed-media work on canvas and a companion to Rope, Fire, Water, is an example of Pindell’s memorial work and exposes the violent subjugation perpetrated by the 15th-century explorer who is still celebrated as the United States’ founding father. Her shaped abstract canvases reveal the multiple ways in which Pindell combined political content, autobiography and abstraction after 1980. Works such as Diallo or Separate but Equal Genocide: AIDS refer to specific events and commemorate those lost to state violence and inaction. While these works incorporate text and symbolic imagery, they are also highly worked painterly surfaces. For many of these works, like the more abstract Tarot: Hanged Man, Pindell made the surfaces from strips of canvas stitched together. The uneven forms and jagged sutures of these works interrupt Pindell’s worked surfaces, exposing taught thread and gallery walls.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication, Howardena Pindell: A New Language, edited by Fiona Bradley. It includes writing drawn from across Pindell’s career, along with essays by Anna Lovatt, Adeze Wilford and Amy Tobin.