Awareness Post (#3)

For this quarter's awareness post I'm focusing on Howardena Pindell, because I remember seeing an exhibit of her work at the VMFA and finding the fact that she'd made her pieces with the paper left over from hole punches absolutely fascinating. Pindell works in many different media, including painting and performance but because they're what first caught my eye I'm focusing on her collage pieces. Her work is notable because of her unique style, which combines collage, ideas from the Pointillist movement, and 3D elements.

Educations and notable career accomplishments:

• BFA from Boston University

• MFA from Yale University

• Studied color theory under Sewell Sillman

• 12 years working in the MoMA

  • Usually in curator-adjacent positions, but she had a lot of different jobs there

• Co-founded A.I.R. Gallery

  • First US artist-directed gallery for female artists

• 4 years working as a visiting professor at Yale

• Currently an art professor at Stony Brook University

Galleries:

• Spelman College (1971, 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)

• G.R. N’Namdi Gallery (1992, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2006, Chicago, Detroit, and New York)

• Garth Greenan Gallery, New York (2014, 2017, 2019)

• Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta (2015)

• Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018)

Howardena Pindell, Untitled 6F

Howardena Pindell, Untitled #87b

Howardena Pindell, Untitled #57

I really love the range of colors and textures that Pindell includes in her work. There are different sized hole punches, sometimes some sort of structured scaffolding in the background, and occasionally she even includes the paper that she punched the holes out of in a piece. I think that the layered, textural quality to all of her work is incredible, and I'd be interested in trying to include more texture in some of my own pieces.