Howardena Pindell
b. 1943
East-West: Music Making Angel
1986
gouache, tempera, postcards, on museum board
27 x 35 x 7 inches
identified verso
Exhibited: Women Only! In Their Studios, Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami (February 16-March 30, 2008)


A similar example from this series is included in the permanent collection of The Mint Museum, and the description of their work is relevant to this example: Howardena Pindell experimented with various forms of collage throughout her career, from her provocative works made up of hole punches in the 1970s to the dynamic curving forms of her “Autobiography” series from the early 1980s, which includes The Mint Museum’s East/West (Gardens). Pindell created the series after a severe accident in 1979 left her with short-term memory loss. The “East/West” part of “Autobiography” utilizes postcards collected during her global travels, reconfiguring images from places that she visited into compositions that recall flashes of memories, perhaps echoing the way in which the brain works to piece together information. Gardens were sources of inspiration and solace to Pindell when she encountered racism and prejudice during a trip to Japan. (source: mint museum.org)

Lowery Stokes Sims, in her essay: Synthesis and Integration in the Work of Howardena Pindell, 1972-1992: Pindell has definitely gravitated to what she described as "more natural shapes" as the "circle/ oval has become more biomorphic, less symmetrical, generated by some internal intuition of nature."14 In these works, Pindell segments the postcard images that splays out form through the repetition of discretely progressive views of a scene." (source: jhu.edu)