Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen

Howardena Pindell (American, b. 1943) explores the intersection of art and activism in her powerful ouevre. What Remains To Be Seen spans the New York–based artist’s five-decades-long career, featuring early figurative paintings, pure abstraction, and conceptual works, as well as personal and political art that emerged in the aftermath of a life-threatening car accident in 1979. The exhibition traces themes and visual experiments that run throughout Pindell’s work up to the present. 

Trained as a painter, Pindell has challenged the staid traditions of the art world and asserted her place in its history as a woman and one of African descent. Since the 1960s, she has used materials such as glitter, talcum powder, and perfume to stretch the boundaries of the rigid tradition of rectangular, canvas painting. She has also infused her work with traces of her labor, obsessively generating paper dots with an ordinary hole punch and affixing the pigmented chads onto the surfaces of her paintings. Despite the effort exerted in the creation of these works, Pindell’s use of rich colors and unconventional materials gives the finished paintings a sumptuous and ethereal quality.

The work she has created since 1979, when the accident left her with short-term amnesia, engages the world beyond the painting studio. Expanding on the experimental formal language she previously developed, Pindell has explored a wide range of subject matter, from the personal and diaristic to the social and political. Her “Autobiography” series transforms postcards from her global travels, which she used to reconstruct her memories, into photo-based collages. Other bodies of work, such as her “Rambo” series, respond to broader cultural concerns and critique sexism, racism, and discrimination at large. 

The exhibition also highlights Pindell’s work with photography, film, and performance, media she has used to explore her place in the world. Her chance-based experiments include photographing her drawings juxtaposed over a television screen, as well as creating Free, White and 21 (1980), a performance for film based on her personal experiences of racism. The exhibition also includes Pindell’s most recent works from the last two years, which draw on the beauty and innovation of her approach to abstraction to build upon contemporary conversations around equity and diversity. 

The Rose Art Museum’s presentation is a major return of the artist to the museum: in 1993, the Rose hosted Howardena Pindell: A Retrospective, 1972 to 1992. Decades later, What Remains To Be Seen—the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date—explores the continued arc of Pindell’s career, celebrating her singular vision and its enduring imprint on contemporary art.

Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen is organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The exhibition is co-curated by Naomi Beckwith, Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and former Senior Curator, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The Rose Art Museum presentation is organized by Assistant Curator Caitlin Julia Rubin.

Lead support for Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris: Caryn and King Harris, Katherine Harris, Toni and Ron Paul, Pam and Joe Szokol, Linda and Bill Friend, and Stephanie and John Harris; Kenneth C. Griffin; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and Marilyn and Larry Fields. Major support provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Charlotte Cramer Wagner and Herbert S. Wagner III of the Wagner Foundation, Liz and Eric Lefkofsky, and Nathan Cummings Foundation, with the support and encouragement of Jane Saks. Additional generous support provided by Garth Greenan Gallery.

The Rose Art Museum presentation is supported by a generous gift from Gerald S. and Sandra Fineberg.