White Cube, which has locations in Europe, Asia, and the US, has added Howardena Pindell, an influential artist and curator now in her 80s, to its roster. The gallery will feature a new artwork, Tesseract #16 (2024), by Pindell at its booth at Art Basel in Switzerland next month.
As part of the deal, White Cube will represent Pindell in Europe and Asia, and her longtime representative, Garth Greenan Gallery, will continue to do so in the US. The two galleries will each mount related solo shows for the artist in November, with Greenan’s in New York and White Cube’s in Hong Kong, marking the artist’s first solo in Asia. Pindell will no longer be represented by Victoria Miro, which has shown her since 2018.
“I am very excited to be joining White Cube, and I especially look forward to having my work shown in Asia this fall,” Pindell told ARTnews in an email.
Pindell, who received her MFA from Yale University in 1967, has made an expansive body of work for more than six decades, spanning painting, video, collage, and drawing. Among her most well-known works are abstractions made by affixing thousands of hole-punched circles of variously colored paper to unstretched canvas. She received her first solo show in 1971 at Spelman College’s Rockefeller Memorial Galleries.
Another major work is her 1980 video Free, White, and 21, in which Pindell recounts moments of racism she has experienced, to which a white woman (played by Pindell in makeup and a blonde wig) responds by invalidating her lived experience.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Pindell worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for 12 years; she was among the first Black curators to be hired by the institution. She also was a co-founder of A.I.R. Gallery, the influential women’s co-operative arts space. She once joked, in a 2018 ARTnews profile, that her “résumé is over 100 pages long, and I need to update it.”
Howardena Pindell, Manhattan Is Sinking, 1971.
Photo Christopher Burke Studios/©Howardena Pindell
Though Pindell has been producing important work for the past half century, it was only recently that she had received long-overdue recognition by the mainstream art world. She received her first retrospective in 2018, which was co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Other important institutional exhibitions have followed, including at the Shed in New York (in 2020) and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2021).
Recent group exhibitions include “Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces” at MoMA (2022), “Women in Abstraction” at the Centre Pompidou (2021), “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” at the New Museum (2021), “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2019), “Histórias Afro-Atlânticas” at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2018), “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, 1963–1983” at Tate Modern (2017), and “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85” at the Brooklyn Museum (2017).
In an email to ARTnews, White Cube’s global artistic director Susan May said, “It’s a great honour to work with Howardena, whose influence as an artist and curator is evident of her commitment to a radical and pioneering practice. It’s an exciting time to show her work throughout Europe and Asia and continue to broaden its recognition in these regions.”
