Spike Island presents A New Language, an exhibition bringing together paintings, works on paper and video from Howardena Pindell's six-decade-long career. The exhibition tradcks the development of Pindell's artistic language from the 1970s to now and examines her work as exemplary in articulating empowerment.
Best known for her monumental abstract canvases, Pindell has challenged and expanded the definition of abstract painting.
Experimenting with materials such as glitter, talcum powder and perfume, she makes intricate and thought -provoking works that engage with the social and political issues of her time.
A selection of paintings and works on paper from the 1970s map the development of Pindell's distinctive, process - driven abstraction. In these works, the artist adopts the language of minimalism to create complex and sumptuous surfaces through laborious working processes such as hole-punching, spraying, cutting, sewing and numbering.
From the 1980s onwards, this abstract language is coupled with more personal and political works that often incorporate text into their surfaces to address subjects including slavery, violence against Black and Indigenous people, the lasting effects of imperialism, the AIDS pandemic, and the climate crisis.
Alongside paintings and works on paper, the exhibition includes the videos Free, White and 21(1980) and Rope/Fire/Water (2020). These works tackle the pervasiveness of racial inequality, drawing on Pindell's own experiences, as well as on historical data relating to segregation, discrimination and race-based violence in America.
The exhibition takes its tit le from an essay written by Pindell in the 1980s, in which she calls for a 'new langugae' for people of colour in the arts - one 'which empowers us and does not cause us to participate in our own disenfranchisement'.
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