Howardena Pindell comes full circle

It was first a trickle, but visitors to ‘Off the Grid’, Howardena Pindell’s latest show, soon swelled into a crowd, packing the cavernous galleries at White Cube Bermondsey to the rafters. But even a healthy gathering seems to fall short of Pindell’s stature in 2025, just as her first UK shows in the last decade felt like overdue corrections rather than natural arrivals.

My first time writing about Howardena Pindell’s work in 2019 felt like a belated homage to a belated event: her first UK gallery exhibition at Victoria Miro, staged when she was 76. She has been referred to as a “genius artist,” a phrase whose historical ease of attribution seemed, until recently, intractable from male assignments.

My second time seeing a Pindell show, ‘A New Language’, came during a museum visit to Cambridge. My own surprise at a museum like Kettle’s Yard mounting a major survey of a Black American abstractionist in 2022 wasn’t just about geography; it signalled a broader institutional shift perhaps prompted by the cultural pressures of Black Lives Matter or a long-overdue reevaluation of abstract modernism’s historical omissions.

My third time was to see Pindell herself at ‘Off the Grid’, her first UK gallery retrospective. Our meeting was preceded by a Q&A with curator Zoe Whitley, whose heralded 2017 show ‘Soul of a Nation’ at Tate Modern had been another occasion to see Pindell’s work.

“Shoot,” said the 82-year-old Pindell as her conversation with Whitley began, realising she had left her glasses behind and could not read from her notes. Yet she spoke with clarity about her life and work, apologising for forgetting long-past details less from habitual politeness than from a penchant for accuracy. The apology was needless; her presence alone was enough, a sheer act of will considering she is wheelchair-bound, for whom transatlantic travel is a logistical feat. I was introduced to Pindell where she sat before Oceanic Underwater, surrounded by acolytes and onlookers. 

“Where are you from?” she asked me. 

“Nigeria,” I responded, after which she went on to recall all the African countries she’d visited in her life  faster than I could retain them. 

After fifteen years living in London the question becomes tiresome: just how to capsule an entire life in passing: perpetual first contact. Dressed warmly in long skirts, cardigans and a beanie-beret, the layering and the wheelchair contrasted sharply with the speed of her mind, to say nothing of the space-defying 20-foot work behind her, or the other sizable pieces in ‘Off the Grid’.

Finally, in January, the interview – on Zoom. Again, and as with her Q&A with Whitley, Pindell had prepared handwritten answers to my questions in advance. She was seated in her new studio in New York –her largest yet,  which was made possible by her US gallerist, Garth Greenan, for whom she holds back no praise. “He has given me everything I’ve ever wanted,” she told me, speaking not of accolades but of infrastructure and continuity. More than that, of moral support: “He doesn’t let you get discouraged. He says, ‘Howardena, don’t freak out. It’s going to be okay.’”

As the conversation progresses, Pindell’s measured tenor gave way to a looser, chattier stream of facts and anecdotes about her life and work. She might apologise for not remembering a detail, but her travels and professional challenges are recalled with clarity and, oddly, no discernible bitterness –impressive, considering the list of slights that would have crushed the weak-willed, however gifted. 

A Yale education did not guarantee job placements in the immediate post-Civil Rights era, where the teaching posts she sought were “all male and white,” and others went to Black men.  “It was hard for a woman – white or Black – to get on.” At MoMA she worked for 12 years in the later dissolved Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, rising from exhibition assistant to associate curator and then director of the department. 

In 1979, Pindell left MoMA and began teaching at SUNY Stony Brook, where she would remain for over four decades, retiring only recently. Unavoidable comparisons include Sam Gilliam and Jack Whitten, major figures in postwar American abstraction whose careers unfolded alongside Pindell’s, even as institutional recognition followed uneven paths. British readers might associate her with Bridget Riley, whose commitment to optical abstraction shaped a generation of British modernism. A closer parallel, however, lies with the German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven, whose sustained engagement with numerical systems echoes Pindell’s career-long investment in grids, mathematics and astronomy.

Much has been said and written about Howardena Pindell and the red circle – its origins are in a story she has told numerous times about driving through the American South with her father. They stopped for refreshments at a restaurant where they were served in bottles of root beer with a red circle stuck to the bottom. On asking her father what they were for, he explained: a way of marking out utensils used to serve Black people in the American South. It’s a harrowing story with a harrowing history, and the greatest disjuncture is that it was told to a child. That cannot have been without influence, or at least must have run parallel with Pindell’s enduring preoccupation with the circle. At the same time, she has rejected the deterministic aspect of this argument – which, in my summation, resolves the question too neatly. It short-circuits the processes of creativity, thinking, theorising and practice sustained over many decades. It turns an origin story told to a young child into a fixed and definitive artistic identity.

In Reclaiming Abstraction, Sarah Louise Cowan addresses this tension head-on. There is a quote by Pindell that goes: “I thought of the circle in other terms. To me, it’s the simplest form. Our eyes are round. We don’t have square eyes. Somehow it’s primary to me. The earth is round. When gravity works, you get a mass that’s circular. The sun is round and the stars are seen as points of light. I see everything as energy represented by little circles that move at a certain velocity.” 

But a  centre must hold somewhere. So I asked: “Do you have a baseline? A way of staying intact?”

I imagined Pindell’s hesitation registered surprise at the question, the answer to which was clear-eyed, unflinching but not unforgiving – that fine line which had prompted it. A commitment to mental health and emotional processing has helped, she explained, including therapy and 12-step programmes. Doing so, Pindell says, ensures painful experiences do not “sit and fester.” This way, she is able to speak openly and publicly about discrimination and, if I were to psychologise, accept recognition untainted.

Standing before Pindell’s monumental Oceanic Underwater (2024) – made especially for ‘Off the Grid’ – one gets a sense of being pulled and possibly overwhelmed if some form of resistance, in the form of genuine interest or interpretation, doesn’t come to the fore. At 20ft wide – across three panels, free-hanging from the ceiling, enveloped by the gallery’s white, caption-free walls – the fields of teal, turquoise, and white which define Oceanic Underwater.  The piece is informed by her long-term interests in astronomy, something she inherited from her father, whose occupation as a statistician instilled in her an early interest not in mathematics per se, but in its visual representations: number systems and grid formats.

The majority of works in this room are also spray-dot paintings, though mid-scale and of various colours, which portray a cohesive whole when seen from a distance but upon close inspection reveal an endless, restless jumble of spray-dots –like constellations from distant galaxies without the mediating help of binoculars. This sense of scale expands while looking around this largest of White Cube’s gallery spaces, as does the sense of bewilderment. To keep curiosity from escalating into the existential, a foothold is needed: reverse-engineering Pindell’s constellation down to its smallest dot.

When Howardena places one dot over the next, she introduces motion. Once motion is introduced, so too is the concept of time. That time could be limited to the physical gap between one dot and the next, or to infinitude. This alone is enough to astound and astonish, but let your mind wander. 

Oceanic Underwater resembles the reflection of the cosmos on the ocean. From a distance, the dominant colour appears as harmonious shades of blue-teal and green-teal. Up close, its entropy is visible throughout: oranges, pinks, and a bright green dominate in a dicey dichotomy of disorderliness and rhythm brought on by repetition and accumulation. “I see everything as energy, represented by little circles that move at a certain velocity,” said Pindell in Reclaiming Abstraction. This is even more apparent in Pindell’s Tesseract works, which consist of deep shades broken by lighter colours, further defined by geometric or amoebic, ill-defined forms. They circle a central form whose broken contour lines introduce motion, so that what initially appears static begins to read as a swirling vortex.

The question about a baseline wasn’t only personal. I was asking what holds the centre in her work: in paintings that, from a distance, appear settled and whole, but up close dissolve into endless jumbles of dots and movements, never quite cohering. And I’ve come to think there might not be one. The centre is entropy itself, but entropy as a settled state not chaos. Pindell has always been too conceptual for painters, too abstract for political art, too political for abstraction, too rigorous for what gets coded as feminist softness, too outspoken for institutions, too institutional for radicals. The spray-dots demonstrate this. They move constantly, resist fixity or inertia, but that resistance becomes the form, unsettlement as methodology.