Howardena Pindell: A New Language at Spike Island
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"Free entry! Unmissable first UK solo exhibition of Howardena Pindell’s 60 year career; an artistic journey from her monumental abstract canvases of the 70s to the concrete themes of everyday racism explored in her more recent video works. ‘A New Language’ will show at Spike Island until May 21st."

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A event on Sunday 23rd April. The event starts at 12:00.


Free Entry.

An exhibition surveying Howardena Pindell’s six-decade-long career, from early abstract paintings to more overtly political works that tackle subjects including slavery, violence against Black and Indigenous people, and the AIDS pandemic. The show takes its title from an essay written by Pindell in the 1980s, in which she calls for ‘a new language’ for people of colour working in the arts—one which ‘empowers us and does not cause us to participate in our own disenfranchisement’.

Please be aware that works in this exhibition feature images and descriptions of racial violence, including lynching. Our gallery team will be available if you have any concerns or would like to discuss the work.

A New Language is organised by the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh in collaboration with Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Spike Island, Bristol

HOWARDENA PINDELL
Howardena Pindell (b.1943, Philadelphia, PA) works across painting and film. She is an activist, critic and teacher who spent over a decade working at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as one of the institution’s first Black curators. Largely known for her monumentally scaled abstract canvases, Pindell has expanded the definition of what abstract painting can be through her inclusion of glitter, paper circles made from punched holes, and the layering of mixed media and scent. She rose to prominence through the late 1970s and early 1980s and had a major solo exhibition at the Studio Museum, Harlem in 1986.

Throughout her career Pindell has exhibited extensively. Notable solo and group exhibitions include: the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art; PS1, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Museum Brandhorst, Munich. In 2020, an exhibition of new work at The Shed, New York articulated Pindell’s response to racism and white supremacy against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement and growing international outrage at anti-Black state violence in the US and elsewhere, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

Find out more: https://bit.ly/3YCsPnM

Entry requirements:

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