Howardena Pindell is an artist, activist, and educator working through the media of painting, drawing, print and video. Primarily an abstract painter, she emerged in the early 1970s in New York, making process-driven abstractions, embellishing the language of minimalism – of circles, grids and repetition – in a visibly laborious process of hole-punching, spraying, sewing, and numbering. The exhibition is the largest presentation of her work in Europe to date.

Curators Talk: On Friday 13 October at 1.15pm IMMA Director, Annie Fletcher, will give a gallery talk on the work of Howardena Pindell. No booking required. Meeting Point – IMMA Main Reception.

Trained as a figurative painter, Pindell began working abstractly in the 1960s. She started drawing and layering, a process that grew on its own and developed into the abstract works she is known for today. Her growing use of abstraction coincided with the famous “dematerialization” of the art object, the emergence of conceptual art as a movement that prioritized thought over form.

From the 1980s Pindell’s practice began to deal explicitly with issues of racism and discrimination, her work took on a more overtly political tenor, which anticipated the Black Lives Matter movement by thirty years. Pindell deals with issues including colonisation and enslavement, violence against indigenous populations, police brutality, the AIDS crisis and climate change. Her video works tackle the pervasiveness of racial inequality, drawing on Pindell’s own experiences and on her collation of historical data relating to segregation, discrimination and race-based violence in America.   

The exhibition includes new paintings fresh from Pindell’s studio, just shown in New York in 2022. These new works show Pindell circling back to some of her concerns of the early 1970s and 80s. Returning to her method of painting using a stencil, her new work quotes from work made half a century ago. Pindell’s work encompasses her own story with abstraction joined to a sense of social and political urgency and an understanding that the pressures, prejudices and exclusions she faced as a black artist and a woman needed to be part of the subject of her art.

This exhibition has its origins in Howardena Pindell: A New Language, organised by the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh in collaboration with Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Spike Island, Bristol.

Content Warning: We would like to advise visitors that the two video artworks featured in this exhibition contain graphic imagery and detailed sensory descriptions of historical and recent violence against children and adults, including direct reference to racism experienced by Pindell and her family.