Nearly four and a half decades after Spelman College hosted the first public exhibition of the paintings and drawings of Howardena Pindell, the New York artist returns to the school for a deep look back at her accomplished career.
“Howardena Pindell,” a solo exhibition of her intricately layered mixed-media paintings and works on paper, opens Aug. 25 at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art for a run through Dec. 5.
Anne Collins Smith, the museum’s curator of collections who curated the show with director Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, calls Pindell’s work “astute, attuned and richly textured.”
Pindell is known for creating oblong and unstretched canvases that are often torn apart and stitched back together. Her detailed experimentation with hole-punched circles, hand-written numeration and personal postcards create atmospheric work that considers the relationship between chaos and logic, time and repetition and force and movement, according to the exhibit announcement.
Now an art professor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, Pindell was associate curator of prints and illustrated books at the Museum of Modern Art and the co-founder of A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn.
“I sustain myself through sheer tenacity, as the art world does not want artists of color to be full participants,” the artist wrote in “In The Heart of the Question: The Writings and Paintings of Howardena Pindell.” “I work because it’s my life’s work. I have no other choice.”
She will participate in “An Evening with Howardena Pindell and Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell,” a conversation between the artist and the Spelman president, at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 24.
Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; noon-4 p.m. Saturdays. Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, 350 Spelman Lane S.W., Atlanta. 404-270-5607, museum.spelman.edu.
