UC Berkeley

In 1969, artist Howardena Pindell (b. 1943) carted several of her large, abstract paintings uptown to the Studio Museum in Harlem. The recently opened institution, situated in a predominantly black neighborhood, was established to provide quality exhibition space for living African American artists. The director of the museum roundly rejected Pindell, telling her to “go downtown” and “show with the white boys.” “Downtown” was not a viable option for the young artist, as galleries there almost entirely excluded women artists and artists of color from their rosters. Taking the highly politicized, often contradictory artistic imperatives of this period as a starting point, “Mending Abstraction” offers an interdisciplinary examination of how abstract art in the United States changed as a result of the Black Arts Movement and the feminist art movement of the 1970s. The first scholarly monograph on Pindell’s groundbreaking work, it examines her practice from the late 1960s through the early 1980s—densely textured paintings, conceptualist works on paper, multimedia photographic experiments, and video work.

Pindell arrived in New York City in 1967, a newly minted graduate of the MFA program in painting at Yale University. Over the course of the following two decades her most enduring contributions to modernisms, I argue, would emerge from an extended, implicit use of the metaphor of mending in her multimedia artistic practice. This textural, hand-worked approach to art-making occurs in Pindell’s oeuvre primarily through collage, tactility, and a textile logic. “Mending” offered Pindell a reparative approach to abstraction, allowing her to find possibilities in the idiom as she navigated the widespread era belief that a black, white-collar woman could not produce meaningful abstract art. The study emphasizes the materiality of her post-minimalist works, examining, for instance, how she wielded labor-intensive processes drawn in part from Nigerian and Ghanaian textiles. It illuminates the scope and significance of Pindell’s abiding contributions as an artist, curator, and art world activist. My analyses are undergirded by black feminist theories and draw extensively on interviews I conducted with the artist and original archival research.

“Mending Abstraction” centers the work of women of color artists and challenges the prevailing historiography of abstraction, showing that the silos it creates—especially black feminist cultural production and modernist abstraction—obscure historically important interactions and innovations. By attending to these blind spots, my dissertation contributes to more complete accounts of how abstract art and ideologies of race and gender have co-developed around issues such as authorship and aesthetic hierarchies. Pindell’s career serves as an ideal springboard for studying neglected interactions between black feminist cultural practices and late modernism because, as I argue, she critically took up the intersections of these terms in her work. This project aims not only to provide a comprehensive account of Pindell’s practice, but more broadly to examine black women’s contributions to post-civil rights era cultural debates. It therefore discusses Pindell in relationship to poet Audre Lorde and artists such as Senga Nengudi and Beverly Buchanan. My research suggests that these black women’s innovations influenced a subsequent generation of artists who investigated how the personal and social converge in even the simplest, most “universal” of forms. “Mending Abstraction” reveals how abstraction both persisted within and changed as a result of post-1960s developments in performance art, video art, and post-minimalist sculpture, and argues that black women figured centrally in these artistic developments that transformed late modernist art.

Ultimately, “Mending Abstraction” traces Pindell’s movements through a variety of artistic institutions in order to expand scholarly understanding of abstraction and of contemporary art more broadly. It offers a reconsideration of how vernacular practices and modernist discourse intersected during this vibrant period in U.S. art history. This research challenges disciplinary assumptions that have mapped artistic ambitions onto artists’ social identities, revealing that women of color artists have intervened in, rather than simply denounced, developments in American modernisms. Through more robust examinations of women of color artists’ contributions to the period’s drastic reconceptualization of art, art historians can better understand how aesthetic practices and social transformations have helped to develop one another.