ABSTRACT
This chapter will primarily focus on the work of Howardena Pindell. In one respect, Pindell’s practice during the first half of the 1970s was framed by a self-criticality that was given through her political convictions. To this end, in addition to considering the artist’s contribution to abstraction, a contribution that tendentiously both reworked and necessarily broadened certain aesthetic methods that had characterised formalist abstraction, her relationship to the women’s movement and her role as a black artist engaging with an abstract pictorial language (as opposed to making work that was more didactic in scope and import) will also be examined. In this respect, the chapter builds on recent scholarship on African American abstraction that works to acknowledge abstraction’s imbrication with, rather than separation from, society.
