Howardena Pindell is recognised as a leading contributor to contemporary dialogues around the social and political urgency of process-driven art. Collage has played a key role in Pindell’s art since the 1970s, her engagement with the paper chads that result from the hole punch process emerging organically from the process of creating her spray paintings of that decade. These small circles of paper or card were incorporated into her painting process as early as 1973. Later, Pindell began building up the punched-out dots on the canvas, sometimes adding other materials, such as a sprinkling of glitter across the surface, too.

The circles and ovals she corrals into service in works such as Untitled #1A, 2011, some punched out of colourful drawings created by the artist over several years, abut and overlap, bursting out of the notional picture frame. The forms of these layered, detailed works tend towards the amorphous, creating dynamic tension between aggregate and whole.

About the artist

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell has exhibited extensively throughout her career. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include Howardena Pindell: Rope/Fire/Water at The Shed, New York (2020–2021) and the major survey exhibition Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen, which toured from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018) to Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (2018) and Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Massachusetts (2019). Pindell’s work also appeared in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, London (2017), which toured to Brooklyn Museum, New York (2018-19), and The Broad Museum, Los Angeles (2019).

Her work is currently displayed in several exhibitions and collection displays at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington; CCS Bard, Annandale-On-Hudson; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Maine; Speed Art Museum, Louisville and Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain.

Howardena Pindell: A New Language, the artist’s first solo exhibition in a public organisation in the UK, is on view at Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, from 13 November 2021 until 2 May 2022.