Howardena Pindell (b. 1943), Skowhegan Series: Lake Lillies for Karen, 1980-81.

Howardena Pindell

(b. 1943)

Skowhegan Series: Lake Lillies for Karen.

Tempera, gouache, postcards, punched paper, nails, fluorescent paint, glitter and thread on board, 1980-81.

Signed and dated "1980-81" in pencil, lower right on the mount. Titled in pencil, lower left on the mount.

14 x 24 in. (35.6 x 61 cm.), Frame: 30 1/4 x 18 1/4 x 4 1/4 in. (76.8 x 46.4 x 10.8 cm.)

Additional Details

Provenance:

Private collection, New York (1981).

Thence by descent, private collection, Connecticut.

Exhibited:

Monique Knowlton Gallery, New York, 1981. (label)

Howardena Pindell: Odyssey, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, February 12 - June 12, 1986. (label)

Notes:

Howardena Pindell first engaged with hole-punched circles by counting and numbering each one, then placed them over a gridded form — often the lines of graph paper — and added embellishments such as acrylic, watercolor, glitter, and even baby powder. Pindell's affinity with numbers and grids grew from the influence of her father — a mathematician who often wrote down figures in a gridded journal. In 1972, Pindell was one of 22 co-founders of the A.I.R. Gallery in New York, which was the first artist-directed gallery for women artists in the United States. By 1977, she was appointed associate curator in the Prints and Drawings Department at MoMA.

In 1979, just when she was beginning the next phase of her career as a professor of art at SUNY, Stony Brook, Pindell was injured in a serious car accident that left her with acute memory loss. Her subsequent 1980-81 Memory series transformed postcards saved from her global travels into elaborate assemblages that helped reconstruct her memories.

This assemblage is a stunning example from her early 1980s Memory series, with the most vibrant colors and rich surfaces. The Skowhegan series was made over a short period after Pindell's year on the faculty of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in the summer of 1980. Two other works from this series were exhibited by Garth Greenan Gallery at Art Basel in 2021. Howardena Pindell now serves on the Governor's Circle of Skowhegan.

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