The circle first emerged in Howardena Pindell’s work during her studies at the Yale School of Art in the 1960s. Inspired by a fellow artist in the graduate program, Pindell adopted the shape, only to later realize that she was tapping into her early experiences with racism.
As a child, Pindell and her family had stopped at a root beer stand while traveling through northern Kentucky and Southern Ohio. She noticed red dots affixed to the bottom of their mugs. The shape, her father would explain, meant that the mugs were for “colored only."
Since her realization, Pindell has used dots as a way of reclaiming the shape, saying, “I have [since] been obsessed with the circle, using it in a way that would be positive instead of negative,” adding with some humor, “I get great pleasure out of punching holes.”
Using a variety of hole punching tools, the artist punches discarded cardstock, manila folders, and heavy watercolor paper to create stencils. These stencils are then used with spray paint to cover large-scale canvases to create fields of color.
Pindell’s work complicated geometric minimalist ideals as well as the expected role of a black artist. Pindell was combining the minimalism of the circle with maximalist techniques, adding materials like glitter, sequins, and molten paint to her cut paper circles in dense layers, and using abstraction often with political purpose.
"Howardena was among the first to take formal experiments and use them as the language of politics,” says curator Naomi Beckwith. “Howardena is one of those people who can tell a very different story about what art does in our world.”
Her work would grow more mathematical and system based, leading to larger body of works with celestial themes such as constellations and star charts, inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope images of galaxies.
In Aurora Borealis/Solar Storms: August 2022 #1, Pindell continues the exploration of the theme, while returning to her spray dot technique that she began in the early 1970s.
“From the harsh social reality of the Jim Crow laws to remote celestial patterns, Pindell binds abstraction to ‘real’ phenomena,” explains professor and writer Martha Schwendener. “Pindell shows us that even the most abstract-looking design may be tied to a structure of infinite complexity, as it is in astronomy, or social injustice, as it was in the red circles on the bottom of those root beer mugs.”
