Howardena Pindell is a pioneering artist, curator, and educator whose work encompasses painting, collage, film, and conceptual practice, and frequently explores themes of identity, racism, feminism, and the politics of artmaking. Over the course of five decades, she has developed a singular vocabulary that merges rigorous formal experimentation with deeply personal and social narratives.

Born in Philadelphia, Pindell earned her BFA from Boston University and her MFA from Yale University in 1967 before moving to New York. She worked for over a decade at the Museum of Modern Art, eventually becoming an associate curator, while also pursuing her studio practice. In 1979, she co-founded the feminist gallery ADO Contemporary (later A.I.R. Gallery). The same year, she survived a near-fatal car accident, an event that profoundly shaped much of her later workwhich became more introspective and autobiographical.

The work in this collection is an excellent example of Pindell’s signature “hole-punch” works, in which she laboriously punches thousands of tiny circles from sheets of paper, often recycled from earlier works or found materials. These punched elements are then layered, scattered, and affixed to surfaces as tactile confetti. The process embodies both order and chance, with influences from Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Process Art, while asserting a unique, handmade sensibility.

“Pindell drew inspiration from a root beer bottle she remembered from a childhood trip while with her parents in Ohio. The bottom of the mug had a big red circle on it, a mark once placed on dishes and silverware used to serve people of color in the racially segregated United States so that their utensils and serving ware could be distinguished from those for "Whites only." Because of this, Pindell experienced the circle as "a scary thing" and the shape preoccupied her as an artist. Experimenting with circles…actually enabled her to repair her relationship with the shape, as she told the New York Times: “I get great pleasure out of punching holes.” (1)

Pindell has exhibited widely, with retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018) and major presentations at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her influence extends beyond her studio practice to her decades-long career as a professor at Stony Brook University, where she has mentored generations of artists.

1. At 77, Howardena Pindell Exorcises a Chilling Memory from Childhood - The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/arts/design/howardena-pindell-shed-video.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2025.

Selected Exhibitions

Fragments of Myself / The Women: An Exhibition of Black Women Artists, Douglass College Art Gallery, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 1980

Afro-American Abstraction: An Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Nineteen Black American Artists, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, NY, 1980

HOWARDENA PINDELL: Abstraction as Metaphor 1972-1992, Kenkeleba House, NY, 1993

Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery, David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland, College Park, 2010

The Chemistry of Color: Contemporary African-American Artists, Columbia Museum of Art, SC, 2010

Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, traveled to Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 2018-19. This was her first major museum survey, tracing her five-decade career across media, themes, and formal innovation.

Rope/Fire/Water, The Shed, NY, 2020-21

Howardena Pindell: Inner Space, Garth Greenan Gallery, NY, 2024