Howardena Pindell

Howardena Pindell was the first black curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, appointed in 1967. She served a 12-year tenure before attending Yale University, from where she received her MFA. The artist’s early practice, such as the video work Free, White and 21, produced in 1980, would address her experience as a young black woman in America, bringing light to quotidian racism.

In this long ranging body of work, commenced in the 1970s, the artist uses a hole puncher, a staple of the corporate office environment, to produce thousands of circles that she then distributes across the canvas. Richly layered and highly tactile, Pindell’s active surfaces undermine the minimalist, purportedly pure aesthetic of the contemporary art of her generation. The form also carries a symbolic meaning: on a car ride through Kentucky in her youth, the artist was struck by a red circle on certain mugs at a root beer stand — a mark that signified which utensils were designated for black patrons. Through her art making, Pindell reworks the circle, liberating the form from any racist connotation.