Acrylic, dye, punched paper, glitter, sequins and powder on unstretched sewn canvas, 1977. 1880x2235 mm; 74x88 inches. Signed and dated in ink on the verso.
Provenance: the artist; private collection, Georgia. Obtained directly from the artist in Chicago by the current owner when it was first exhibited 30 years ago.
This beautiful work is one of the few large-scale early pieces of this important contemporary artist to come on the secondary market. It embodies her minimalist work from the late 1970s, and her interest in finding both a political and personal voice through the use of non-traditional media. While process-oriented and introspective, this work also implictly criticizes the male-dominated world of abstract Minimalist painting Pindell encountered after earning her M.F.A. from Yale University. Her art challenges the notion that abstraction is devoid of political, personal or social reference with her use of encrusted, obsessive, precious, coral-like surfaces. In 1978, Pindell left her position as a drawings curator at MoMA to teach art at SUNY, Stony Brook. Pindell soon became an activist voice in the art world, founding A.I.R. Gallery, a cooperative exhibition space for women, while the content of her work became increasingly explicit.
Also from this late 1970s period is the slightly larger, striped instead of gridded, Feast Day of Iemanja II, 1980, in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, recently included in the 2006 exhibition Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980. Other similar, early works are in the permanent collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center. Later works are in numerous museum collections, including the Fogg Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
