In this new series, The Artists, an installment of which will publish every day this week and regularly thereafter, T will highlight a recent or little-shown work by a Black artist, along with a few words from that artist, putting the work into context. Today, we’re looking at a piece by Howardena Pindell, a painter and mixed-media artist whose work explores themes of racism, sexism and xenophobia.
Name: Howardena Pindell
Age: 77
Based in: New York City
Originally from: Philadelphia
When and where did you make this work? In my studio in New York City. I moved out of my loft to a large apartment on account of the rent increase in 1987. I had a loft in SoHo on Broome Street. I worked on it in the room I now use as a bedroom. My ceilings are about 10 feet high, and I was able to install tract lighting.
Can you describe what’s going on in it? It is part of my “Autobiography” series. (It is in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem.) I have four portraits of myself, one as a little child holding a ball, which I find interesting since I use the circle, and one with the foot of my ex-boss at the Modern stepping on my head [Pindell worked at the Museum of Modern Art from 1967 to 1979]. She was not pleasant. I lay down on the canvas and cut out my figure and put in realistic portrait heads, which I painted from photographs of me at various ages. It also deals with issues of racism in the upper right area where there is a target. I enjoy using text and images. I think my childhood exposure to ancient Egyptian art, in which text is image and image is text, influenced me. A family friend said that there was a mummy in the Philadelphia Museum that looked like me. I was taken to the museum as a result. It was a Fayum, an encaustic mummy with the portrait painted on a linen-like cloth wrapping. I went to see the pyramids, in Luxor and Thebes, and the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in 1974.
What inspired you to make this work? I had been in a car accident in 1979 as a passenger and sustained a head injury. After that, I moved from abstraction to works that had a personal narrative and in some cases dealt with issues of racism and women’s rights. One painting in the series dealt with wife-burning in India. It was seen many years ago as an honor to jump onto one’s husband’s burning funeral pyre. It apparently still happens in more remote areas, although it has been outlawed. The wife’s hands were traced onto the Hindu temple’s outside walls. I lived in India for about four months and have lived in the desert. I also have friends there.
What’s the work of art in any medium that changed your life? I feel that my transition from oil to acrylic changed my life. I was trained as a figurative painter and used oil. I went to Yale’s School of Art and Architecture for my M.F.A. and was very influenced by the range of work I saw there. After I graduated, my work gradually became more abstract. I liked manipulating textures that I could get with acrylic. Oil takes a year to completely dry and can crack. Acrylic can crack if you freeze it, and you cannot heat it as the fumes are toxic. You can heat up oil paint with wax to create works that are encaustic, just do not hang it over the fireplace.
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July 24, 2020 at 07:00PM
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A Portrait of an Artist Not to Be Underestimated - The New York Times
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