In Conversation with Adeze Wilford and Howardena Pindell

To speak to painter, filmmaker, and educator Howardena Pindell is to grow your reading list. As I write this, I’m waiting for the multi-hyphenate to email me the title of one more book she’d forgotten to recommend; she’s kindly requested that I insert it into our interview. She’ll squeeze that dispatch in between conducting M.F.A. critiques at SUNY Stony Brook, where she has taught for the last forty years. The trajectory of her relationship with institutions began with fine arts degrees from Boston University and Yale, which led to twelve years in various departments—mostly curatorial—at the Museum of Modern Art, during which time she co-founded a women-run gallery, A.I.R., in her native Philadelphia. Pindell has, as in her first video piece, Free, White, and 21 (1980), used media to explicitly comment on her triangulation between Blackness, feminism, and an art world dominated by whiteness and its agenda. She has also used multimedia methods to critique the intangible wounds left by the same structural racism that kept her video piece Rope/Fire/Water from being developed for decades. Formally, Pindell has imbued abstraction with a new materiality—she created her Untitleds, beginning in 1973, with glitter, with layers of hole-punches, with stitched-together canvases, with thread, with graph paper, all unsequestered by a glassed frame. In 2018, she was the subject of a traveling retrospective whose aim was a comprehensive survey of one of the first Black women to carve out a consistent place for herself in the arts industry and its attendant academia. The retrospective’s title, however—What Remains to be Seen, points to the missing work, the unrealized ideas, which institutional access demands.