LONDON.- White Cube announced representation of artist and curator Howardena Pindell (b.1943, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). The artist will be jointly represented by White Cube (Europe and Asia) and Garth Greenan Gallery (US).
In November 2024, White Cube Hong Kong will present Pindell’s first solo exhibition in Asia with all new paintings, coinciding with an exhibition at Garth Greenan Gallery in New York. Prior to these shows, Pindell’s Tesseract #16 (2024), a new work incorporating her iconic spray-painting technique, will be on view at White Cube’s stand at Art Basel 2024.
Spanning over five decades, Pindell’s profoundly personal and politically charged practice – comprising painting, collage, drawing and film – addresses a wide range of issues, from racism and gender inequality to the Vietnam War, homelessness and the AIDS crisis. Alongside her career as an artist, in the 1960s and ’70s Pindell served a 12-year tenure as a curator for the Museum of Modern Art and co-founded A.I.R. Gallery – New York’s first women’s cooperative art gallery.
Growing up amidst segregation and coming of age during the civil rights movement, Pindell cites a profound childhood memory of an encounter with Jim Crow law as the impetus behind one of the most enduring motifs in her work. When she was eight years old, during a family trip to northern Kentucky, her father stopped the car at a roadside root beer stand. Pindell recalls noticing red circles at the bottom of their cups, later learning that they were used to differentiate the utensils designated for Black customers.
This experience manifested in her work through ubiquitous variations of the circular motif – ellipses, perforations, spray-painted dots and hole punches. Examples include the ‘Untitled’ paintings initiated in the late 1960s, in which the circle is atomised and accrued, as well as her most recent ‘Tesseract’ series, which comprises additional geometric shapes.
After sustaining head trauma and partial memory loss in a near-fatal car accident in 1979, Pindell began her ‘Autobiography’ series (1980–2005). To aid her recovery and as a means of catharsis, the artist incorporated postcards and photographs from her past into mixed media paintings and works on paper.
Created a year after the accident, Pindell’s inaugural and most famous video work, Free, White and 21 (1980), features the artist recounting several racially charged anecdotes experienced by herself and her mother.
Serving as much as a diaristic account of her own biography as a means to interrogate broader issues of social justice, Pindell’s work lends visceral form to a rigorous intellectual inquiry of the given subject.
