When the 82-year-old artist Howardena Pindell was a child, she saw herself in the face of a mummy. This was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the late 1940s or early 1950s — she can’t quite remember the year. But she clearly recalls the painting, an eerily naturalistic Fayum portrait from Roman Egypt, which was made while the subject was still alive to preserve her face. It was the first time Pindell, young and Black in a segregated city, saw her resemblance in a museum. Perhaps as she stared at this person — nearly two millenniums old — who looked so much like her, she felt the years between them briefly collapse. Since then, she’s made a practice of reshuffling time, and refracting her own likeness, in her art.
Pindell has a charged relationship to memory. In 1979, she survived a life-threatening car accident that left her with memory loss. By that point, she was about a decade into her career as an abstract, pointillist artist known for her colorful, large-scale “Spray Dot” paintings, and she’d just left the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she’d made history (and endured racism) as the museum’s first Black woman curator. After the accident, Pindell started making art that grappled with her fragmented identity, incorporating the silhouette of her own body and scraps of personal mementos into sprawling collages. Often, these works were also embedded with what she calls her “premonitions” — symbols, figures and text that seemed to predict experiences that Pindell hadn’t had yet. She also made “Free, White and 21” (1980), her first video piece and perhaps her most famous work to date. In it, the artist looks directly at the camera with an impassive stare while recounting a litany of racist encounters from when she was a child, a student at Boston University and a recent graduate of Yale’s MFA program looking for work in New York City. She also appears in whiteface, as a darkly comic avatar for those who had so frequently discounted her experiences.
In March, I met with Pindell on two Friday evenings at her cavernous studio in the South Bronx. The cadence of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, closely echoed that of “Free, White and 21”: In examining the past eight decades of her life, the artist frequently shared precise, searing anecdotes of racism she’d been subjected to, her voice quiet but steady. “My memory’s rotten,” Pindell said. And yet, she’s turned her memories — the broken ones, the cloudy ones and those she can’t forget — into an art form and a protest.
Nicole Acheampong:
How long have you been in this studio?
Howardena Pindell:
It’s very hard for me to walk. I had knee-replacement surgery [on one leg], but this [other] one is getting worn out and needs replacement too. But I like to keep busy. I’ll be 82 next month, and I don’t consider that an excuse.
N.A.:
What’s your daily routine like?
H.P.:
I’m not at the museum anymore. I’m not teaching. Although I find this amusing — the nursing home was right across the street from a university. And when I realized it was a university, I relaxed, because I understood the environment. I could remember how teaching felt. It looked like a very mixed body of students; all different colors.
N.A.:
Which must have felt like a big difference from when you were in school.
H.P.:
Yes. I grew up in Philadelphia in the 1940s. Philadelphia had de facto segregation. But you knew, the moment you went anywhere, that they did not want you there, by just the dirty looks, and — God knows.
There was a store called John Wanamaker. They had a Santa Claus for Christmas, and my parents dutifully took me. He was a white guy. And as soon as I sat on his lap, he pushed me off. I’d thought Santa really existed. But I can remember staring out the window after that trip, and thinking about Santa, “Uh-uh, you’re gone.”
N.A.:
Were your parents encouraging of your artistic interests?
H.P.:
She had a mouth on her. She was trained as a teacher at Bowie State University and Wilberforce, two Black schools. She taught teachers, and then she eventually taught the third grade. She was a historian and she was interested in geography. My father was a mathematician and a science person — numbers, numbers, numbers. And he was a court administrator for the Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, which meant he supervised probation officers, and there were guns in his office that had been confiscated. He also tutored people. I remember one of the people he tutored got a perfect score on his S.A.T. I did not.
N.A.:
Given that he was a math and sciences guy, what led him to encourage your art practice?
H.P.:
Mrs. Osher, my third-grade teacher, called my parents in and said, “Your child is extremely talented in art. You need to do several things: Put her in a Saturday art program, introduce her to male and female artists and take her to museums and galleries.”
N.A.:
At Fleisher, were you the only Black student?
H.P.:
I don’t remember seeing another Black student. I also took fashion design and drawing classes at the University of the Arts. And I went to Tyler School of Fine Arts, which was at Temple University in Elkins Park, where I worked with ceramics and drawing. I had no sense of direction; I was just sampling everything.
The museum visits came about in a funny way. A family friend saw a mummy portrait that looked like me in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The portraits were painted when the person was alive, so it was always a very upbeat portrait. It’s not a death mask at all. They brought me in to see the one that looked like me, and it turns out the museum only had it out for a short time, so it was amazing that we saw it.
N.A.:
How old were you?
H.P.:
Probably under 10.
N.A.:
I wonder how many artworks you were seeing in museums that looked like you in any way at that time.
H.P.:
Well, that was the only one. The only one.
N.A.:
What did you love most about it?
H.P.:
I’d never seen anything like it. And I loved that he wasn’t doing recognizable things in a normal manner. Seeing his work challenged me, because all I knew was figurative. And Boston U. was definitely figurative.
N.A.:
I’m curious how you landed there.
H.P.:
I wanted to go to an art school that had strong academics. I was there from ’61 to ’65, and I went early so I could just do academics for a semester and then be in the BFA program. The Black artist Richard Yarde was in the graduate program after me, and he said to me years later, “Howardena, they only admitted one Black person a year.” Attitudes in Boston were horrible. You couldn’t go to a restaurant without the threat of them telling you that they wouldn’t serve you.
N.A.:
Were you able to form any type of community, either with other students or people in the neighborhood?
H.P.:
There was a Finnish graduate student who was living with a white family. She became a good friend. One day she said to me, “Oh, I’d love for you to come for dinner at their home.” They went wild, ballistic, and told her to never see me again. And when she told me this, she was in tears. She had to give them what they wanted. They wanted to be free of someone Black.
I kept running into things that were awful. An Armenian friend and I went to a Russian film festival at MIT. There was a guy who wanted to drive her back to Boston and just leave me behind. I said, “No, you’re taking me, too.” I’m a bit of a bitch at times.
N.A.:
You were asserting yourself.
H.P.:
He was really angry. I remember he slammed the door. But at least we both got home safe. But her parents said she couldn’t have me as a friend, because I wasn’t white. God, what other instances? I used to play a 12-string guitar, and my really good friend Susan played a regular guitar. I learned Jewish folk songs, and we went to Hillel and did programs. Her parents were furious that she had a Black friend, and they withdrew her from school and made her go to Rutgers.
N.A.:
Because of you?
H.P.:
Because of me. And then in the art department, one particular student probably just [mentioned me in passing] to her parents — this young woman was very kind and innocent — and her father called up the department and said he’d pay the school to get rid of me; he said the teachers should give me lower grades. I found that out because my sculpture teacher, who was a pretty decent guy, sat down with me and said, “There’s something going on, and I think you should know about it.” But there was one teacher that did lower my grade — in anatomy drawing. In Boston, in general, I didn’t feel safe.
N.A.:
Did you have any place that felt like a retreat?
H.P.:
N.A.:
When did you start thinking about trying something more abstract in your art?
H.P.:
N.A.:
“That’s what I was going for!” What other kinds of work were you making as a grad student?
H.P.:
I started dealing with color. Josef Albers’s course [on color theory] was amazing. Sy Sillman, one of his protégés, taught it, and I took the course with architects and graphic designers. Being with other disciplines was the most impressive thing that I experienced there — being challenged with other ways of thinking.
And I really liked hanging out with the gay male students. I could talk to them. But the people that weren’t [gay] were very aloof.
I worked as the telephone operator for Helen Hadley Hall, which was the women’s dorm at Yale — the guys called it the Bay of Pigs. Nice, huh? One time this guy heard my voice. Now, I don’t sound Black, and when he came in, he went crazy. He said, “Oh-oh, I made a mistake.” Even if he didn’t say what he was thinking, he was obviously upset by who he saw running the switchboard. [Laughs.]
N.A.:
I feel like it requires a certain type of self-knowledge and confidence to be able to so frequently be the only Black woman in these spaces and remain clear on who you are. Do you think that’s something your parents instilled in you?
H.P.:
I don’t know if I’d say they fostered it.
In my kindergarten class, there may have been one other Black student. And I remember the teacher said at nap time, “Now, children, if you have to go to the bathroom, raise your hand.” I raised my hand. And she was infuriated! She tied me to the cot. And I remember lying there thinking, “I’m not going to pee my pants. No, I’m not.” I don’t know how I held it in.
The thing that made it even more frustrating was that when I told my father, he said, “Well, you have to follow authority.” I said, “I did.” And he didn’t have any reaction that would in any way give me a sense of confidence.
N.A.:
It sounds like you weren’t receiving a lot of sympathy as a child from family or from other authority figures.
H.P.:
I got sympathy from my mother’s mother, Grandma Lewis. She was just wonderful. She lived in southern Ohio, and her kitchen was in a tornado cellar — you had to open a trapdoor and go down a ladder. She’d cook with wood, not coal, and she grew her own food. The one thing that made me really mad at her was when she killed a chicken for dinner. I couldn’t eat the meat.
N.A.:
The same thing happened to me when I was young with my grandmother in Ghana. I was so upset, I wouldn’t eat the chicken. Did you visit your grandma regularly in Ohio?
H.P.:
N.A.:
Can you say more about what drew you to circles?
H.P.:
It’s an iconic form, of course: the shape of the sun, the moon, atoms, molecules. And all this stuff has a circular format — even these cups we’re holding. We’re not drinking out of squares. The circle is everywhere.
Then I started making my own paper. MoMA’s conservator for paper works taught me what to do. She suggested a very good filtration system [to preserve the paper], and those pieces look exactly like they looked back in the 1970s.
N.A.:
What prompted you to move to New York and look for a job at MoMA?
H.P.:
In ’67, the art world was showing mainly white men, and they were not hiring people of color or women to teach in the MFA or BFA programs.
I just walked into MoMA and — the nerve on my part — I said, “I’d like to speak to personnel.” There was an Asian woman at the personnel desk who made the decision to send me upstairs, to interview at a desk where there was a job. And I was hired to start in the Department of National and International Circulating Exhibitions. My entering salary was $5,000 a year. With a $5 raise in a couple of years and a nice little note from the Rockefellers at Christmas. [Laughs.]
N.A.:
Well, the note is priceless. …
H.P.:
René d’Harnoncourt was the director of the museum when I joined. Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s first director [who’d stayed on in an advisory role], would wander the halls. There was an almost royal feeling about Barr. Then they hired [Bates Lowry], and he just went through the place. He reminds me of Trump, though not as evil as that. He closed down the department I was in. They didn’t tell us to go away; they just let people leave. But I wouldn’t leave.
William Lieberman, who at the time was the head of [what would become] Prints and Illustrated Books, asked me to work for his department. And he was really my mentor because he had me presenting things at acquisition meetings. With Riva [Castleman, who became the department head next], it was like, “Stay in your place.” But Lieberman was very protective of me.
N.A.:
What types of exhibitions did you work on as a curator?
H.P.:
N.A.:
Was there anything about your work as a curator that you feel directly inspired some of the artwork you were making at the time?
H.P.:
When the museum was closed, I’d walk through the galleries at lunchtime. It’s funny what I was drawn to: the Surrealist [René] Magritte, [the Russian painter Vasily] Kandinsky, [the French artist Odilon] Redon, of all people.
I curated “Printed, Cut, Folded and Torn,” a show about manipulating paper. It somehow got out that I was working on that, and a famous white female artist had the balls to call me up and say, “I’m not going to be in your show.” “I didn’t ask you!” I hadn’t asked anyone yet.
Believe it or not, despite all that, I was the acting director of the department when the chairman was gone. One time, a dealer — I won’t say who — called to see if her artists had been collected. And I had to say, “No. I’m sorry.” And she started saying, “Niggers! Niggers!” Yep.
When I’d walk around the Upper East Side, back in the ’70s when more galleries were up there, people asked me, “What are you doing here?” I remember I got an invitation to a reception at the Guggenheim. I said, “Well, I never go to those things. Let me go.” I walked in and someone said, “What are you doing here?” The same thing would happen at the Ferragamo store, which was on Fifth Avenue around the corner from MoMA. I went to get a pair of shoes. I walked in, and not the salespeople but the clients were saying, “What do you want?”
N.A.:
What was the culture like within MoMA? Did you feel quite isolated?
H.P.:
Oh, very. There were some other people of color. There was a Native American curator in the architecture and design department. Some people went out of their way to be kind. Some of them were awful. My favorite awful one was a woman who went to South Africa during apartheid. She gave a little party for everybody, but she wouldn’t invite me.
When I first started, I worked on a show with the curator Lucy Lippard, who introduced me to the white women’s feminist movement. There was a consciousness-raising group, and I was the only Black person — the usual token problem. And when I started talking about racism, they’d shut me down and say, “No, we don’t want to talk about that. That’s not our problem.”
N.A.:
H.P.:
Yes, I was one of 20 people. They were mad because I worked at MoMA. They wanted me to make contacts for them. At one point, a mix of people from A.I.R. and white feminists came to picket the museum, and they called me up at my office and said, “Come down, you have to picket with us.” I said, “No, I don’t want to lose my job.” These women had husbands who paid their bills! I couldn’t afford it.
N.A.:
I’ve read that some of the artists in the AWC, including Andre, were somewhat suspicious of you because you were on staff at MoMA.
H.P.:
I was distrusted.
I quit because I’d had it. All the whiteness was getting on my nerves. That’s why I did “Free, White and 21.”
N.A.:
That was your first film. What made you want to try that medium?
H.P.:
It was the only way I could express myself. Also, it traveled: If you have an exhibition, people can only see it in a specific place. With a video, it could be all over the place.
N.A.:
How did it feel to put yourself on camera, given that much of your work before wasn’t self-referential? Did it feel scary?
H.P.:
No, I could have fun with it. With the white mask and makeup, the sunglasses and the blond wig. And I’d change clothes; my mother always sent me clothes because she said I looked shabby when I went to the Modern. A Latina woman, Maria Leno, arranged for the camera crew, and she also helped me edit it.
And then the next step was a one-person show at Cyrus Gallery. An art critic who’d introduced me to Cyrus said, “You cannot show that tape. You just can’t.” And I said, “I’m not going to take it out of the show.” So she went to Cyrus and said, “I command you. I demand that the tape be removed from the show.” And they said no.
And what she said to me was, “If you don’t remove it, I’ll never speak to you again. I know the Rockefellers. I know X, Y, and Z.” I haven’t seen her since.
I’m surprised that the video has had such longevity; I really am.
N.A.:
It’s been about 45 years since you made that work, and it still feels so timely and sharp.
H.P.:
I think that Trump has thrown everything back — for white women, too.
[Back then] I found the feminists very indifferent to anyone but themselves. I remember coming back home after that car accident. I was in the hospital maybe two weeks, and the moment I walked in the door, it was a feminist calling, asking me to write a recommendation for her.
I said, “No. I just got back.”
N.A.:
You had recently started working at Stony Brook University on Long Island at the time of the accident. What has teaching meant to you?
H.P.:
I miss it, but I don’t miss it. I retired last December; I can’t go back in this physical condition. I had about 43 to 44 years there, and I was a distinguished professor. But did I tell you that someone — I think from outside the university — threw black paint at my office door? I’d been on TV talking about politics, and that made someone really mad. I also had one father try to get me fired because I wouldn’t give his son an A. Stony Brook was hard at the beginning, when I’d just had the car accident. It got better as I stayed longer.
N.A.:
What was your daily routine after the car accident?
H.P.:
N.A.:
My understanding is those postcards were part of your process of retraining your memory. How did you gather them?
H.P.:
I’d traveled a lot and kept postcards from different places — the Asia Society now has a number of them on view in a three-artist show. When I was at the Modern, I went on a trip with Lowery Stokes Sims, an African American curator who was at the Met. Each museum paid for everything, and we traveled to Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana.
I’ve been to Cuba. I’ve been to the Soviet Union: The Soviet government sponsored a symposium of African American music, theater, art. I ended up starting to make mosaics because the first thing they did was take us into the subway to see the mosaics.
N.A.:
Why did you turn to this collection of postcards when you were recovering?
H.P.:
It was like trying to mend my brain, because it was split. I’d [put down a] postcard, then paint, postcard, paint, postcard, paint. And then I tried to unify them so it all looked normal. But there’s no way you can make it look normal. I was using gouache and sometimes acrylic, maybe tempera.
N.A.:
And at this point, your work was shifting, in terms of having more personal details in it.
H.P.:
Well, I decided after the car accident to do work that was about something, rather than just being abstract. I thought that I could’ve died, and I’d like to be able to bring up certain issues.
One of the paintings from that is “Autobiography: Fire (Suttee)” (1986-87). I also wanted the work to be about getting my body back. Suttee is [a former Hindu practice, also spelled as sati,] in which, when a man dies, his widow is burned alive on the funeral pyre. I lay down on the canvas, drew my body, cut out my silhouette and then sewed it back in. And then I put handprints all over it. When the woman committed suttee, she’d first put her hand up against the wall and they’d create a high-relief print.
N.A.:
The accident happened very soon after the controversy at Artists Space. What was it like to have both of those things happening at the same time?
H.P.:
And I didn’t shut the show down. Anyone could go see it. But still, to protest, if you were nonwhite, was “censorship.” If you were white, it was just protesting.
N.A.:
Was that the first time you’d been so outspoken about one of these injustices in the art world?
H.P.:
N.A.:
H.P.:
I’d worked on the inside of the art world, but as an artist, I was on the outside. By then I’d served on a number of committees for the National Endowment for the Arts. I remember presenting a Black artist for a commission, and the person running the committee said, “No, no, no, we’ll have none of that.” It gets on your nerves when it keeps happening.
N.A.:
What was the general reaction to the survey?
H.P.:
Hostility — at the fact that I had the nerve. “We’re not racist!”
After that, there was a group that I put together — we were Black, Latino and Asian. I had a list of all the galleries that had either all male artists or all white artists, and one of the members of the group made this wonderful poster of this upscale dinner plate with flowers and the words “We serve whites only.” We put the posters up in SoHo. The group was called Pests.
N.A.:
I wonder what the current political moment feels like to you compared to then.
H.P.:
I think this is worse. I doubt we’ll have another election.
N.A.:
Has it filtered into your new work?
H.P.:
No, I’m cautious because I don’t want to get scapegoated. I don’t want to set up a target. Hitler went after the artists. And I’m not white. I really am afraid of making myself a martyr in that way with him.
I do have issue-related works, but they were all made before his presidency. I’m prodding the gallery to show them at my upcoming exhibition in London. There’s nothing in there about Trump, so I think I’ll get away with it. [Chuckles.] Or about Musk — Muskrat. I call them Rump and Muskrat.
This is strange, but the way Trump is acting, I’m glad I don’t have that many more years to go.
N.A.:
Are there any works that you feel differently about now, or that you would’ve done a different way if you were making them now?
H.P.:
A part of me wants to work on large-scale figurative paintings again, but I’m not strong enough to do it. I work with a team now.
N.A.:
What’s your process with your team?
H.P.:
I go back to our spray room and choose what I want done and in which colors. But I myself couldn’t handle the spray gun; it’s heavy.
N.A.:
Are your newest works leaning more in the direction of abstraction?
H.P.:
Yes. But I always say with my abstractions, it’s my experience from the inside, but I don’t have any control over what you think about it. You’re bringing your experiences to it.
N.A.:
So does the figurative feel more emotionally risky?
H.P.:
I think it’s emotionally and physically risky. I don’t want to keep dealing with that. I’d rather be helpful than be a target, where I can’t do anything but have fear. I don’t want that fear.
Photo editor: Esin Ili Göknar. Digital production and design: Danny DeBelius, Chris Littlewood, Coco Romack, Carla Valdivia Nakatani and Nancy Wu
