MATERIAL WITNESS: The Changing Complex Profile of Black Abstract Painters

James Little, Juju Boogie Woogie, 2013. Image via artnews.com: Courtesy the artist and June Kelly Gallery, NY.

Long marginalized by their community and overlooked by the art market, African American abstractionists are finally coming into the spotlight

Text | Hilarie M. Sheets for ARTnews

Published | June 4, 2014

“Donald Judd didn’t have to explain himself. Why do I have to?” asks Jennie C. Jones, an African American abstract painter who has grappled with the issue of how her work can or should reflect her race. “Fred Sandback can make this beautiful line and not have to have it literally be a metaphor for his cultural identity.”

Jones, 45, sidestepped the debates around multiculturalism that were raging when she was in school in the 1980s and gravitated toward Minimalism. Yet over the last decade, she has forged a conceptual link in her work between the histories of abstraction and of modern jazz in America—“black guys in the 1950s taking jazz into the concert hall and making it this bluesy hybrid with Bach,” as she puts it.

In her recent show at Sikkema Jenkins in New York, an atonal sound environment accompanied her monochromatic paintings that had acoustic panels attached to the canvases. Strips of fluorescent color painted on the edges of the canvases bounced off the white walls and created a sense of movement, rhythm, and vibration. “This art and music juncture,” she says, “gave me the permission to point to something in the room that said, ‘I didn’t fall out of the sky.’”

The contributions of African American artists to the inventions of abstract painting have historically been overlooked, or else fraught with the kind of questions faced by Jones. “Generations of black abstract painters never seem to be celebrated,” says Valerie Cassel Oliver, senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where she recently organized “Black in the Abstract,” a two-part exhibition that focused on the history of African American painters working in abstraction. She placed younger artists, including Jones, Shinique Smith, and Angel Otero, in dialogue with members of the older generation, such as Felrath Hines, Alma Thomas, and Romare Bearden, who were producing seminal works in the 1960s.

“You find these artists being marginalized on both ends of the spectrum,” Cassel Oliver continues. “There was this manifesto with the Black Arts Movement that you did work that reflected the beauty of that community in no uncertain terms,” she says, referring to a group that coalesced in the 1960s to promote social and political engagement in art and literature. “Oftentimes abstract painting is not as celebrated as more figurative work by the black community. From the mainstream art world, it’s just the sense of not being preoccupied with what black artists are doing, period.”

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NEW YORK: Howardena Pindell

Howardena Pindell, Untitled #98, 1977, Mixed media mounted on board, 10 x 9 inches. Image via garthgreenan.com.

Howardena Pindell: Paintings, 1974 – 1980

April 10 – May 17, 2014

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

529 West 20^th Street

New York, NY

From press release posted on garthgreenan.com:

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce, Howardena Pindell: Paintings, 1974–1980, an exhibition of paintings, collages, and drawings. The exhibition is the first presentation of Pindell’s work in a New York gallery in nearly a decade. Eight of the artist’s large-scale, abstract paintings will be on view, most of which have never before been exhibited. A fully illustrated catalogue—Pindell’s first since 1992—will accompany the exhibition, with an essay by Barry Schwabsky.

The exhibition and its accompanying publication provide an overview of Pindell’s work from 1974 to 1980, an incredibly innovative and unique period for the artist. During this time, Pindell began a metaphorical process of destruction/reconstruction in her work, often cutting the canvas in strips and sewing them back together, then building up the surface in elaborate stages: painting or drawing onto a sheet of paper, punching out dots from it, dropping the dots onto her canvas, finally squeegeeing paint through the “stencil” left in the paper from which she had punched the dots. By the late 1970s, sequins, glitter, powder, string, hair, and even perfume had become a part of her labor-intensive, process-oriented approach to painting. Invariably, her constructed canvases are installed unstretched, held to the wall merely by the strength of a few finishing nails.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University. After graduating, she accepted a job in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, where she remained for 12 years (1967–1979). In 1979, she began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook where she is now a full professor. Throughout her career, Pindell has exhibited extensively. Notable solo-exhibitions include: Spelman College (1971, Atlanta), A.I.R. Gallery (1973, 1983, New York), Just Above Midtown (1977, New York), Lerner-Heller Gallery (1980, 1981, New York), The Studio Museum in Harlem (1986, New York), the Wadsworth Atheneum (1989, Hartford), Cyrus Gallery (1989, New York), and G.R. N’Namdi Gallery (1992, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2006, Chicago, Detroit, and New York). 

Her work has also been featured in many landmark museum exhibitions, such as: Contemporary Black Artists in America (1971, Whitney Museum of American Art), Rooms (1976, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center), Another Generation (1979, The Studio Museum in Harlem), Afro-American Abstraction (1980, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center), The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990, New Museum of Contemporary Art), and Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African-American Women Artists (1996, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta). 

Most recently, Pindell's work appeared in: Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980 (2006, The Studio Museum in Harlem), High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975 (2006, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro), WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949–1978 (2009, Seattle Art Museum), and Black in the Abstract: Part I, Epistrophy (2013, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston).

Pindell's work is in the permanent collections of major museums internationally, including: the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Wadsworth Atheneum; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Howardena Pindell.

Exhibit Link