Howardena Pindell.
What Remains To Be Seen.
MCA Chicago, Delmonico, Prestel, 2018
Hardcover with dust jacket.
274 pages.
Near fine, but for light bumping front tip right corner.
Otherwise quite crisp.
Signed and dated.
What Remains To Be Seen spans the New York–based artist's five-decades-long career, featuring early figurative paintings, pure abstraction, and conceptual works, as well as personal and political art that emerged in the aftermath of a life-threatening car accident in 1979.
Born in middle-class Philadelphia in the 1940s, Howardena Pindell came of age during the Civil Rights movement. As an African-American woman artist, making her way in the world provided Pindell with source material to inspire her work. This book examines every facet of Pindell's impressive career to date. Since the 1960s, she has used materials such as glitter, talcum powder, and perfume to stretch the boundaries of traditional canvas painting. She has also infused her work with traces of her labor, such as obsessively affixing dots of pigment and circles made with an ordinary hole punch tool. After a car crash in 1979 left her with short-term amnesia, Pindell's work looked beyond the painting studio to explore a wide range of subjects, including the personal and diaristic as well as the social and political. This monograph also highlights Pindell's work with photography, film, and performance. Excerpts from the artist's writing, in particular her critique of the art world and her responses to feminism and racial politics, provide prescient commentary in light of conversations around equality and inclusion today.
