
Howardena Pindell creates work that fuses formal abstraction, social critique, and self-reflection through the use of unconventional materials and experimental, labor-intensive techniques. She began exploring abstraction and collage in the 1970s, relying especially on materials she could access easily, particularly through her curatorial post at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Following several years of sustained investigations of applying chads to paper, Pindell pivoted to working on unstretched canvas, enmeshing the small circular pieces into dense layers of paint, powder, and other media. This exhibition concentrates on that period of Pindell’s output, featuring large-scale paintings from the mid- to late 1970s that variably recast and obliterate Minimalism’s core compositional devices, such as the grid and the monochrome. With their haptic, textured surfaces and weighty, almost bodily presence, these works exemplify her approach to art making at the time, reflecting a broad range of influences from textile designs to feminist politics while elucidating her meticulous, iterative, yet playful processes.
Howardena Pindell is an American artist, curator, writer, and educator whose work fuses rigorous abstraction with urgent reflections on race, gender, trauma, and memory. Over more than five decades, she has developed a materially inventive, conceptually rich practice spanning painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, photography, and video, while simultaneously challenging structural exclusion within major art institutions.




DIA Beacon is a renowned contemporary art museum situated in Beacon, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River. Housed in a repurposed 1929 Nabisco box printing factory, its expansive galleries and minimalist architecture make it a destination for lovers of postwar art and industrial design.

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