BOOK: Howardena Pindell-Howardena, White Cube
Published to accompany Howardena Pindell’s solo exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey, “Howardena” functions both as a lavishly illustrated monograph and as an essential interpretive companion to one of the most formidable careers in contemporary art. The book charts Pindell’s work from the 1960s to the present, offering readers visual and intellectual access to an artist whose practice has been as materially diverse as it has been politically incisive.
By Efi Michalarou
The book’s design — a pocketable hardcover wrapped in a hole-punched dust jacket over manila board — signals its conceptual affinity with Pindell’s own artistic lexicon. The material choices resonate with Pindell’s recurrent engagement with industrial forms and process-based surfaces, where serialization, repetition, and tactility are formal strategies. Though compact in scale, the book’s full-bleed reproductions ensure that textural subtleties — whether the dense layering of hole-punched dots or the granular surfaces of her mixed media works — are rendered in compelling detail.
“Howardena” distinguishes itself through its commissioning of four new texts that deepen the reader’s understanding of Pindell’s thematic commitments and formal strategies. The introductory essay by Rosanna McLaughlin provides a lucid framing of Pindell’s career arc, while Christina Sharpe’s contribution — focusing on Pindell’s persistent use of the circle — enriches our appreciation of what might initially appear as a simple motif. Sharpe situates this form not merely as a visual device but as a symbolic nexus of memory, trauma, and reclamation — a practice deeply embedded in Pindell’s biography and political sensibility.
The inclusion of a reflective piece by Lucy R. Lippard, a longtime friend and critical interlocutor, further anchors the volume within the broader history of feminist and institutional critique in art. Lippard’s essay on Pindell’s films underscores the artist’s movement beyond painting into performative and time-based media, charting how her work from the early 1980s onward engaged directly with social justice concerns in ways that often unsettled prevailing critical expectations.
Moreover, the in-conversation between Pindell and Courtney Willis Blair — which grapples with Pindell’s use of the grid — advances a rare, first-person articulation of how formal rigor and conceptual urgency intersect across her oeuvre. This dialogic text not only elucidates Pindell’s structural thinking but also gestures to the broader dialogues between abstraction and identity politics in late-20th-century art.
By situating “Howardena” within Pindell’s larger cultural project, the book complements existing scholarship — such as Sarah Louise Cowan’s Reclaiming Abstraction — that underscores how Pindell’s work rejects easy categorization. Whereas mainstream narratives often seasonalize her practice as either purely formal or overtly political, Howardena makes clear that Pindell’s abstract lexicon itself is a vehicle for political meaning. Her dense arrays of repeated marks — informed in part by a childhood encounter with segregation that later motivated her to “change the circle in [her] mind” — exemplify this convergence of form and content.
If the book has limitations, they stem less from editorial choices than from the inherent challenges of condensing a five-decade career into a single volume. At times, the thematic threads (e.g., memory, trauma, institutional critique) risk overshadowing the technical evolution of Pindell’s practice — an evolution that other monographs (such as What Remains to Be Seen) address with more chronological breadth. Nonetheless, Howardena is commendable for balancing visual richness with intellectual rigor.
