#tmagazine

BAKARY & BOLU

JUMA

Trailblazing #artistactivist #HowardenaPindell featured in @tmagazine's 2025 "The Art Issue."

Story and images reposted from @tmagazine

How to Be an Artist

Four major artists talk to us about where their obsessions came from — and what they did about the obstacles thrown in their way...

The artist Howardena Pindell has a charged relationship to memory. In 1979, she survived a life-threatening car accident that left her with memory loss. By that point, she was about a decade into her career as an abstract, pointillist artist known for her colorful, large-scale “Spray Dot” paintings, and she’d just left the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she’d made history as the museum’s first Black woman curator.

After the accident, Pindell started making art that grappled with her fragmented identity, incorporating the silhouette of her own body and scraps of personal mementos into sprawling collages. She also made “Free, White and 21” (1980), her first video piece and perhaps her most famous work to date. In it, the artist looks directly at the camera with an impassive stare while recounting a litany of racist encounters from when she was a child, a student at Boston University and a recent graduate of Yale’s MFA program looking for work in New York City. She also appears in whiteface, as a darkly comic avatar for those who had so frequently discounted her experiences.

In examining the past eight decades of her life for T’s art issue, Pindell also shared precise, searing anecdotes of racism she’d been subjected to. “My memory’s rotten,” Pindell said. And yet, she’s turned her memories — the broken ones, the cloudy ones and those she can’t forget — into an art form and a protest.

Tap the link in our bio to read the full story, written by Nicole Acheampong (@nicole_akosua). Photos by Aundre Larrow (@aundre).