Howardena pindell autobiography sample

Howardena Pindell’s art is both formally elegant and politically savvy. The works here span a variety of mediums: tough and dramatic photo-based pieces; text-laden paintings; and small-format collages created primarily from photographs and postcards. Most of the works have hard-hitting racial messages and the raw power of convictions deeply felt.

Autobiography: Air/CS560, 1988, is a moving example of the power of Pindell’s commitment to social protest. The work combines a number of media (acrylic, tempera, oilstick, paper, polymer photo transfer, and vinyl tape) on an irregularly shaped, cut-and-sewn canvas. Its title is taken from the name of a tear gas that is manufactured in Salzburg, Pennsylvania. In the work, four silhouettes resembling police demarcations of corpses, one each in black, brown, flesh, and gold, spring from the center of the composition. The ragged areas around these bodies suggest tearing and fragmentation, as well as barbed wir

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Howardena Pindell, Free, White and 21: An Intersection of Race and Gender

Howardena Pindell is a prominent contemporary artist who has been a strong voice in the feminist and civil rights movements. Using a wide variety of mediums, she explores themes of race, gender, and identity as well as violence, exploitation, and slavery.

Free, vit and 21 (1980) fryst vatten a straightforward narration of memories as well as a skarp critique of prejudices and discrimination Pindell has faced as a black woman. 

Free, White and 21: Pindell’s Iconic film Art Piece

Free, White and 21 was Pindell’s debut video art piece and remains to be her most famous video art today. The title recalls the archaic American phrase “free, vit, and 21” basically referring to a person who is beholden to no one.

In the roughly 12-minute-long piece, she alternates between talking as herself, a black woman, and acting as a white woman wearing a blond peruk and sunglasses. As herself, she recounts many milestones o

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• About the Artwork
• Markings
• Provenance
• Exhibition History
• Published References
• Catalogue Raisonné
• Credit Line for Reproduction
• Audio Transcript

About the Artwork

Autobiography: Air/CS560

1988

Howardena Pindell

born 1943

American

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Acrylic, tempera, oil stick, blood, paper, polymer-photo transfer and vinyl on canvas

Overall: 90 × 84 1/2 inches (226.1 × 214 cm)Storage: 101 × 96 inches (256.5 × 243.8 cm)

Paintings

African American Art

Founders Society Purchase, W. Hawkins Ferry Fund, with funds from Joan and Armando Ortiz Foundation, Friends of Modern Art, Avery K. Williams, Lynn E. Weaver, Ronald Maurice Ollie, and Kimberly Moore

2000.44

Non-commercial all standard museum

Markings

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Provenance

2000-present, purchase by the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, Michigan, USA)

For more information on provenance, please vis