Mending Abstraction: Howardena Pindell’s Black Feminisms By Sarah Louise Cowan A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History of Art in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson, Chair Professor Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby Professor Lauren Kroiz Professor Leigh Raiford Spring 2019 © Copyright by Sarah Louise Cowan, 2019. All rights reserved. Abstract Mending Abstraction: Howardena Pindell’s Black Feminisms by Sarah Louise Cowan Doctor of Philosophy in History of Art University of California, Berkeley Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson, Chair In 1969, artist Howardena Pindell (b. 1943) carted several of her large, abstract paintings uptown to the Studio Museum in Harlem. The recently opened institution, situated in a predominantly black neighborhood, was established to provide quality exhibition space for living African American artists. The director of the museum roundly rejected Pindell, telling her to “go downtown” and “show with the white boys.” “Downtown” was not a viable option for the young artist, as galleries there almost entirely excluded women artists and artists of color from their rosters. Taking the highly politicized, often contradictory artistic imperatives of this period as a starting point, “Mending Abstraction” offers an interdisciplinary examination of how abstract art in the United States changed as a result of the Black Arts Movement and the feminist art movement of the 1970s. The first scholarly monograph on Pindell’s groundbreaking work, it examines her practice from the late 1960s through the early 1980s—densely textured paintings, conceptualist works on paper, multimedia photographic experiments, and video work. Pindell arrived in New York City in 1967, a newly minted graduate of the MFA program in painting at Yale University. Over the course of the following two decades her most enduring contributions to modernisms, I argue, would emerge from an extended, implicit use of the metaphor of mending in her multimedia artistic practice. This textural, hand-worked approach to art-making occurs in Pindell’s oeuvre primarily through collage, tactility, and a textile logic. “Mending” offered Pindell a reparative approach to abstraction, allowing her to find possibilities in the idiom as she navigated the widespread era belief that a black, white-collar woman could not produce meaningful abstract art. The study emphasizes the materiality of her post-minimalist works, examining, for instance, how she wielded labor-intensive processes drawn in part from Nigerian and Ghanaian textiles. It illuminates the scope and significance of Pindell’s abiding contributions as an artist, curator, and art world activist. My analyses are undergirded by black feminist theories and draw extensively on interviews I conducted with the artist and original archival research. “Mending Abstraction” centers the work of women of color artists and challenges the prevailing historiography of abstraction, showing that the silos it creates—especially black feminist cultural production and modernist abstraction—obscure historically important interactions and innovations. By attending to these blind spots, my dissertation contributes to more complete 1 accounts of how abstract art and ideologies of race and gender have co-developed around issues such as authorship and aesthetic hierarchies. Pindell’s career serves as an ideal springboard for studying neglected interactions between black feminist cultural practices and late modernism because, as I argue, she critically took up the intersections of these terms in her work. This project aims not only to provide a comprehensive account of Pindell’s practice, but more broadly to examine black women’s contributions to post-civil rights era cultural debates. It therefore discusses Pindell in relationship to poet Audre Lorde and artists such as Senga Nengudi and Beverly Buchanan. My research suggests that these black women’s innovations influenced a subsequent generation of artists who investigated how the personal and social converge in even the simplest, most “universal” of forms. “Mending Abstraction” reveals how abstraction both persisted within and changed as a result of post-1960s developments in performance art, video art, and post-minimalist sculpture, and argues that black women figured centrally in these artistic developments that transformed late modernist art. Ultimately, “Mending Abstraction” traces Pindell’s movements through a variety of artistic institutions in order to expand scholarly understanding of abstraction and of contemporary art more broadly. It offers a reconsideration of how vernacular practices and modernist discourse intersected during this vibrant period in U.S. art history. This research challenges disciplinary assumptions that have mapped artistic ambitions onto artists’ social identities, revealing that women of color artists have intervened in, rather than simply denounced, developments in American modernisms. Through more robust examinations of women of color artists’ contributions to the period’s drastic reconceptualization of art, art historians can better understand how aesthetic practices and social transformations have helped to develop one another. 2 Contents List of Figures . ii Acknowledgments . xxi Introduction . 1 Chapter One: Moving in Modernism. 13 Chapter Two: Paper Work, Collage Play . 44 Chapter Three: Texturing Abstraction. 71 Chapter Four: Mass Media and Ambivalent Skins. 101 Conclusion . .131 Bibliography . 137 List of Figures Introduction Figure 0.01. Betty Blayton, Reaching for Center, 1970, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 58 in. round. The Betty Blayton Estate. Figure 0.02. Emma Amos, Flower Sniffer, 1966, Oil on canvas, 50 x 50 in. Brooklyn Museum. Figure 0.03. Faith Ringgold, Mother’s Quilt, 1983, Acrylic on canvas, dyed, painted and pieced fabric, 58 x 43.5 in. Private collection. Figure 0.04. Barbara Jones-Hogu, Unite (First State), 1969, Screenprint on paper. The Studio Museum in Harlem. Figure 0.05. Howardena Pindell, Untitled, (#7), 1973, Ink on punched papers, talcum powder, and thread on oak tag paper, 10.13 x 8.38 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Figure 0.06. Artist unknown, war shirt (batakari), Akan, Ghana, 20th century, cloth, leather, cowrie shells, string, 27.6 x 27.6 in. Fowler Museum at UCLA. Figure 0.07. Howardena Pindell, Untitled #20 (Dutch Wives Circled and Squared), 1978, Acrylic paint, dye, paper, thread, glitter, sequins, and powder on canvas, 86 x 110 in. Collection of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Figure 0.08. [detail] Pindell, Untitled #20 (Dutch Wives Circled and Squared), 1978. Figure 0.09. Joe Overstreet, For Happiness, 1970, Acrylic on constructed canvas, 91 x 60 x 31 in. Eric Firestone Gallery, New York. Figure 0.10. Mary Heilmann, Little 9 x 9, 1973, Acrylic on canvas, 21.89 x 21.89 x 1.75 in. Hauser & Wirth, New York. Figure 0.11. Howardena Pindell, Untitled, 1971, Acrylic on canvas, 71 x 95 in. Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Figure 0.12. Howardena Pindell, Untitled #3, 1973, Ink on paper collage, 22.25 x 17.5 in. Collection of James Keith Brown and Eric Diefenbach, New York. Figure 0.13. Howardena Pindell, Still from Free, White, and 21, 1980, Color video with sound, 12:15 min. Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Chapter One i Figure 1.01. Howardena Pindell, Space Frame #3, 1969, Acrylic, crayon, and graphite on canvas, 36 x 53 in. Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Figure 1.02. Howardena Pindell, Untitled, 1971, Acrylic on canvas, 71 x 95 in. Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Figure 1.03. Howardena Pindell, Untitled, 1968, Acrylic on canvas, 42.5 x 66.25 in. Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Figure 1.04. Howardena Pindell, Space Frame, 1969, Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 32 x 40 in. Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Figure 1.05. Howardena Pindell, Space Frame, 1968, Graphite on graph paper, 17.5 x 22 in. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Figure 1.06. Howardena Pindell, Untitled, c. 1968, Acrylic and cray-pas on canvas, 46 x 42 in. Garth Green Gallery, New York. Figure 1.07. Howardena Pindell, Untitled, 1969, Oil on canvas, 52 x 70 in. Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Figure 1.08. [detail] Pindell, Untitled, 1969. Figure 1.09. Betty Blayton, Reaching for Center, 1970, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 58 in. round. The Betty Blayton Estate. Figure 1.10. Frank Stella, Cipango, 1962, Alkyd on canvas, 85.25 x 85.25 in. Private collection. Figure 1.11. Photographer unknown, Howardena Pindell spraying paint through a template at her studio, Westbeth Artist Apartments, New York, c. 1971. In Naomi Beckwith and Valerie Cassel Oliver, eds. Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2018. Figure 1.12. [detail] Pindell, Untitled, 1971. Figure 1.13. Howardena Pindell, Untitled, 1971, Acrylic on canvas, 90.25 x 105.5 in. Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Figure 1.14. Sam Gilliam, Swing, 1969, Acrylic and aluminum on canvas, 119.63 x 283.5 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Figure 1.15. Howardena Pindell, Untitled, 1972, Acrylic on canvas, 90.25 x 119 in. Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Figure 1.16. Howardena Pindell, Untitled, 1972, Acrylic on canvas, dimensions unknown. ii Figure 1.17. Howardena Pindell, Untitled, 1972–73, Acrylic on canvas, 87.5 x 90 in. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Figure 1.18. Robert Rauschenberg, décor for Summerspace, 1958, Enamel on canvas, 201.5 x 526.5 in. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Figure 1.19. Merce Cunningham and dancers performing Summerspace, 1958. Photograph by Richard Rutledge. Figure 1.20. Nelson Stevens, Jihad Nation, 1970, Acrylic on canvas, 42.25 x 42.25 in. Galerie Myrtis, Baltimore. Figure 1.21. Vincent Smith, Easter Sunday, 1965, Oil on Masonite, 20.75 x 24 in. Alexandre Gallery, New York. Figure 1.22. Benny Andrews, No More Games, 1970, Oil on canvas with collage of cloth and canvas, diptych: 101 x 50 in. and 101 x 51 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.