Howardena Pindell: Rope/Fire/Water
The Shed, New York City, through April 11
The centerpiece of Howardena
Pindell’s latest exhibition was nearly five decades in the making, said Anna Purna Kambhampaty in Time.com.
Since 1980, the Philadelphia-born painter and activist has produced work that “touches on subjects others often feared were too political for the art gallery.” But until now, she has never been able to exorcise a sickening childhood memory of visiting a friend and smelling meat cooking in the kitchen as she opened a copy of Life magazine to a photo that showed a black man’s body being roasted over a fire while a white lynch mob looked on. In the early ’70s, when Pindell was one of 20 co-founders of the first nonprofit artist-run women’s gallery in the U.S., she was turned down by her white New York City peers when she proposed building a performance piece around the photo. This year she finally returned to the image, building from it a 16-minute video that should be “an informative, shocking, and cathartic experience for viewers.”
Any exhibition that pairs such political work with Pindell’s early paintings “can feel like a show by two different artists,” said Murray Whyte in The Boston Globe. Yet “the connective tissue is Pindell’s determination to claim her own ground in a world made expressly not for her.” Whether you’re seeing her forging a signature style in abstract minimalism or bluntly confronting racism, “she’s nothing less than heroic.”