>> From the library of congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:03 ^M00:00:16 >> James Sweany: On behalf of the Researcher and Reference Services Division, we welcome to this talk featuring Sarah Cowan, who will discuss textured abstractions, Howardena Pindell's Cut and Sewn Paintings. We thank you for joining us. I'm James Sweany, assistant chief of the Research and Reference Services Division. I would like to take a moment and express those who made this event possible. Particularly to May Metcalf, reference specialist for women's and gender studies, who organized this event and also to Kimberly Crawford of the office of Special Events and Public Programs. We are especially appreciative of Ms. Cowan for coming to the library to discuss Howardena Pindell's paintings with us. The Researcher and reference Services Division provides reference services and collection development for subjects that encompass information and all formats for the arts, humanities, social sciences, local history and genealogy in the main reading room of the Thomas Jefferson Building. We ask that you please check your phones and other devices to assure that they do not interrupt today's program. Also note that this presentation is being filmed to be available as a web cast on the library's website. We will at the end have time for questions after the presentation, so if you ask a question you are giving consent to be filmed. And now to introduce Sarah Cowan, Meg Metcalf of the Research and Reference Services Division. ^M00:01:42 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:45 >>Meg Metcalf: Today I am very excited to share with you the work of a truly interdisciplinary scholar, Sarah Cowan. Cowan, we just talked about that. Oh, my goodness. Sarah is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkley. Her dissertation, "Mending Abstraction, Howardena Pindell's Non-Representation of Black Feminisms, 19667 to 1986," examines how the artist multimedia practice critically inflects discourses of advanced art and relates to black women's cultural traditions. This year she is also a pre-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. After the presentation today we will have time for questions, so please hold those to the end. So, without further ado, please join me in giving a warm welcome to our esteemed presenter, Sarah Cowan. ^M00:02:31 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:34 >> Sarah Cowan: Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you all very much for being here. I really love the work that I get to do and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to share it with you today. In addition to thanking you all for taking your time for being here, I'd like to thank Meg Metcalf for inviting me to speak today and thank you to the rest of the staff at the Library of Congress who make public programming like this possible. As Meg mentioned in her introduction, I'm a doctoral candidate in the History of Arts, which means that I spend most of my days preparing my dissertation, which looks at the first two decades of the extraordinary currier of US artist Howardena Pindell. That career started in New York in 1967 and continues to the present. So, she's still alive and making work. Today I'll be presenting material adapted from one of the chapters of my dissertation. I think it's very apt that we discuss Pindell's work today in the context of a lecture that honors women's history month. Not only is she a woman who has made a profound contribution to her field of modern art, but she has also really devoted herself to making the art world more equitable through her activism research and advocacy she has shown a light on the gender and racial discriminations that have persisted in the culturally elite sphere of contemporary art. And I think one of her more important insights has been to point out that the art world, including publicly funded institutionism, has been shielded from some of the kind of social change that the public has demanded of other institutions, such as our education system or the corporate world. And she is both expanded what is possible within modern and contemporary art through her artistic practice and she's also worked to assure that other women, especially other women of color, have opportunities to do the same. S o, I'd like to start my discussion today with a brief and informal overview of Pindell's 50 year career, then I'll share my paper, which looks at a small number, it looks more closely at a small number of works she made in the late 1970s. And then there should be a few minutes for Q and A at the end. Excuse me. So, Pindell was born in Philadelphia in 1943 at a time when that city was fairly segregated. She was raised an only child in what she has called a "Very middle class household." Meaning for her that she was constantly being dragged around to various enrichment classes, music lessons, dance lessons, but she really took to the visual arts and started weekend lessons in grade school. So, fast forward a few years. In 1961 she starts as an undergraduate at Boston University as a fine arts major. She encounters a lot of racist discrimination in the university and in the city. Her classes at BU are very traditional. The emphasis is on how to create the illusion of three dimensional shapes on flat surfaces through modeling and linear perspectives, so concerns that had really dominated academic art since the renaissance and issues like color and composition are hardly discussed in these courses. So, it was really a revelation when in 1963 she made the short trip to Cambridge to see an exhibition at Harvard's Fog Art Museum, called "Three American Painters." She encounters a totally different way to think about painting that ends up being very impactful. Work by Frank Stella, including this painting was on view and this helps to inspire her to apply for the Master of Fine Arts Program at Yale, where she knows she can get a more sort of modern education. So, she -- excuse me -- enters the MFA program and painting at Yale in 1965. And the focus there is much more on form and color. She continues to work figuratively, but starts abstracting from recognizable subject matter in works like these, where we can still kind of see a relationship between the objects or idea represented in the titles and the painting, but there's not such a tight relationship, sort of representational relationship. So, in 1967 Pindell graduates and moves to New York City to look for a job. After several months of a very discouraging search, as she tells it, she fortuitously walks into the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown to use the restroom and she figures while she's there she may as well ask at the front desk if there are any positions available and she ends up getting interviewed on the spot. In what starts as an assistant position in a traveling exhibitions department, turns into a 12 year long territorial career, one of the most prestigious institutions of modern art in the country. This has an enormous impact on Pindell's life and artistic career. It means that she is seeing lots of art and lots of different kinds of art, she's meeting tons of people, including other artists, and she's developing what she's a called duel identity as an artist and a curator. So, she's learning how things operate from the inside of art institutions and she's also experiencing them as an artist who's trying to get access to those institutions. Eventually becomes the associate curator of Prince, an illustrated books at MOMA. In the first decade of living and working in New York, Pindell drops figuration almost entirely from her practice. She makes artworks that are concerned with color, like in these spray painted compositions. Two shapes, the circle and the grid appear in the majority of her works for an entire decade. Can you all see the image on the left, it seems really blown out from here, but I can't tell. Okay, well, it will just have to work anyway. So, the work on the left is covered in whole punch scraps or chads. These become really emblematic of her work. They are collaged onto a matt board, along with sewing thread and powder and we see these materials appear again and again in her work. She also becomes through these works very interested in texture in these years and I'll discuss that in greater detail in my paper. So, these artistic concerns situate Pindell in discourses around conceptual and feminist part practices and also post-minimalist art through her concern for artistic labor and the physical materials of art. In 1972 Pindell is invited to cofound the first all women's cooperative gallery in New York City, which was call A.I.R. And it is still running today. This gives her new opportunities to show her work and her conversations with other women artists emboldens her to work with feminine coated materials and processes for the first time. But she also begins to notice at A.I.R., as well as in her fulltime job at MOMA, that the predominantly white feminist circles that she was being invited into are very reluctant to deal with issues of racism. And for her, as a woman of color, it seemed really natural that feminism as a political project aimed at the liberation of all women, would have to necessarily concern itself with the intersection oppressions of race and gender. But this expectation isn't met and, in fact, she encounters racism in those feminist circles. ^M00:11:15 ^M00:11:20 Throughout the 1970s and 80s Pindell travels internationally several times visiting Africa, Japan, Europe, India and Brazil, to name a few. And this travel impacts her art as she draws explicitly from imagery and cultural illusions gleaned from these experience. Then in 1979 two traumatic events cause a rupture in Pindell's life and career. The first begins with a SoHo gallery holds an exhibition that uses a racial slur in its title. The show presents abstract charcoal drawings and black and white photographs by a young white male artist. And Pindell and other artists, critics and curators protest the show for its provocative and breezy use of an anti-black slur. While Pindell had participated in some of the wide spread art world activism throughout the 1970s, this is the first time she takes on such a public leadership role. And the exhibition and protest result in art world debate around racism and censorship. And in the ensuing rancor that this causes, Pindell resigns from her post at MOMA as she feels more alienated than ever from colleagues who are defending the exhibition. Within a couple of months of leaving MOMA Pindell starts teaching in the art department at Stony Brook University on Long Island. She actually still teaches there. But at the start of her first semester there she's in a near fatal car accident that leaves her physically debilitated and with severe, though temporary, memory loss. Pindell's work after 1979 starts incorporating figurative elements, such as her silhouette and photo transfer material. Oh, no, silhouette photo transfer material. So, she uses the figurative elements taken from magazines and post-cards as pneumonic devices to help restore her memory function after this accident. And she begins to talk about her art as part of her attempts to heal herself from the accident, as well as from the racism and sexism she's experienced. In 1980 she makes perhaps her most well-known work, the video, "Free, White and 21," which explores the hypocrisy of white feminists who refuse to see racism. And over the course of the 1980s and into the 90s, the content of her work becomes more overtly political and her activism becomes increasingly visible. She publishes documents and statistics that attest to the racial and gender biases that are rampant in the New York art world. She shares this work in many formats, including it's believed through the publications of an anonymous woman of color artist group known as PESTS, which promises to bug the art world. Which I love. And essentially sets out to remake the art world, including her own work into an intentionally politicized zone. In recent years Pindell has returned to working abstractly. The last few years have been really remarkable for exposing her work to new and larger audiences. She currently has a retrospective on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago that has over 130 works in it. If you have a chance to go to Chicago in the next couple of months, I hope you'll see it. and within the last year examples of her works have been included in major exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Tate Modern, a show that traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts here in DC and there's an example of a cut and sewn painting in up Outliers, an American Vanguard Arts, the National Gallery of Arts, so I hope you'll get a chance to see that. It's a little closer than Chicago. So, this is a very exciting, if somewhat urgently busy time to be thinking about Pindell's work. I hope this overview has given you a little bit of a sense of the shape of her career if you weren't familiar with it yet. And I will launch into my paper now. Again, we should have a few minutes at the end for Q and A. These are very washed out. I apologize that you won't actually be able to see some of the details that I'm describing. You'll just have to hang onto my words, I guess. So, in 1976 Howardena Pindell began making cut and sewn paintings by cutting strips of canvas, sewing them together into a large rectangular grid and covering them with collaged and painted materials to form an abstract field. Pale, pastel hues dominate these all over compositions, though there are specks of more colorful color. There are specks of color that model their surfaces and a closer work, which is solicited by these colorful irregularities reveals a dense nubby texture. Small pieces of paper, which are chads produced by a hole punch are ossified, in gesso and acrylic paint and countless of these extend from the works. These protuberant surfaces invite the viewer to move around the paintings. And with different views we catch glimpses of the small shadows and valleys cast by collaged chads, the seams of canvas strips and the sparkle of a large quantity of dust and glitter. And even with the best slides, not all of this, like the glitter, really translates to digital photography. Viewed from up close the paintings elicit a sense of wonderment. Opening up questions about their facture and the artist's labors. How did Pindell manage to apply this massive material fragments to the surface of the canvas? How much time did such an intricate technique require? But the more pressing question raised by cut and sewn paintings arises from the viewer's tactile curiosity. What does it feel like? Modernist arts prohibition against touch frustrates direct response to the edge of our fingertips. Rather our experience of the paintings shovels between the words textural, feel and the conventions of viewership. Suggesting that something could take root in the tension between these ways of knowing the world. Between 1977 and 1981 Pindell completed six abstract cut and sew paintings. On average each of the paintings took 12 months to make and measures around 7 by 8 and a half feet. So, they're very large. Five of the works hang horizontally, evoking landscapes. While a single example is vertically oriented, like portraiture. And the artist created them in the hours you could squeeze out of her work week, which -- during which, as we know, she was working fulltime at MOMA. I argue that the dense surfaces of the cut and sew paintings mark an understudy turning point in Pindell's artistic career. The cut and sew canvases mark the culmination of her increasing concern for an aspect of painting beyond the strictly visual. Texture, or what she has called surface tension. I argue that largely inspired by her exposure to African textiles earlier in the 1970s, Pindell used texture as a vehicle to enmesh illusions to forms -- to these forms with administrative and craft labor, feminist aesthetics and modernist structures, which are all kind of part of the vocabulary of discourses of so called advanced art at this moment. With a surprising combination of valiances, some of which are covertly conveyed, she adapted abstraction to a historically specific and personal material culture. The paintings made use of the openness of abstraction, to dogmatize the ambiguities and contradictions that subtend social identities, ministering specifically to her multiple positions as a white collar black woman artist and curator. ^M00:20:20 ^M00:20:28 On July 24, 1973 Pindell addressed a post-card from Nairobi Kenya to her friends, the art critic, Lucy Lippard, and artist Charles Simmons. Quote, "I will return forever changed, we are so ignorant of Africa. Kenya is full of contradictions." End quote. Written on the artists second day in Africa, the text captures her earliest impressions of the continent. Over the course of the following two and a half decades Pindell would publish four articles on African art and culture and speak on numerous occasions about the relationship between her work and African art. Her extended engagement with African art, textiles in particular, led to a change in the way she approached texture and the canvas in her paintings. A shift that for grounded the pertinence of African textiles to the aesthetics of modern art. These specific uses of African art intervened in the rigorous generally figurative protocols espoused by proponents of the black arts movements in these years. Which I'll discuss in greater detail in a moment. Pindell and Lowry Stoke sense an educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and now a well known curator and art historian, spent two months traveling Africa in the number of 1973, under the auspices of MOMA's overseas books program. They visited Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast. In workshops and studios they saw artists make pottery, starch died cloth, petique, Kente cloth, as we see here, and jewelry. While formative in the breadth of artistic material it introduced her to, the visit to Africa was not Pindell's first extended encounter with African art. In the fall of 1972 MOMA hosted the exhibition, "African Textiles and Decorative Arts." Guest curator by Roy Sieber, an African a space Indiana University. The exhibition presented 250 examples of textiles, jewelry and other objects of bodily adornment from sub-Saharan Africa. For the four month run of the show in New York, Pindell visited the exhibition several times a week, so you can do the math. She saw it many times. There was a -- she saw a panoply of objects there. the vast majority of which were designed to be warn, held or applied to the body, including, and I'm paraphrasing from the press release, East African bark cloth, woven cotton and silk from Ghana and Nigeria, body ornaments and cosmetic accoutrements, such as combs, hair pins, wigs and tweezers. The exhibition was very timely. Since the late 1960s artists, archivist groups in New York, such as the Art Workers Coalition and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition had been organizing to place pressure on the city's public art museums to attend to glaring inequities, including around issues of racial and gender inclusion. Whether or not the exhibition directly fulfilled the demands of these groups, it was well received, with one reviewer arguing that it presented quote, "Evidence of a self-reliant creative powers of the ancestors." End quote. The exhibition appealed to growing public interest in Pan-African culture, which had been spurred in part by the efforts of leaders of the black arts movement to promote black cultural heritage. Although Pindell did not subscribe to the tenants of the black arts movement, African textiles peaked her appetite for African art and motivated her to travel to Africa. This exposure to African art and culture profoundly impacted her art making practice, with particular consequence for the development of the cut and some paintings. Most markedly she never again stretched her canvases, instead, allowing them to hang free like the flowing garments from South Africa, Senegal and Nigeria on display in the museum and she also left many of the edges of her paintings, of the unstretched paintings sort of loose. The study of African arts also inspired her to incorporate a new way of handling materials into the production of the cut and sewn paintings specifically. Weaving, several of the canvases, including untitled number 19, partially comprised interwoven strips of canvas, and you can just make this out some evidence of this in the horizontal scene on the right. Right there should be a little bit of green paint that shows through. But again, I'm not sure how much -- oh, you can see it, okay, great. So, Pindell fabricated the cut and sewn paintings through an elaborate series of steps that underscored her labor. And so bear with me I'm going to try to explain how these were made. Notably the paintings are not painted in the traditional sense of applying brush to canvas, but fashioned through an elaborate process of accumulation that actually ends up obscuring elements of their construction. So, although they're woven, you can only see this in these little glimmers. She began by painting sheets of thick paper in rainbow hues and then excised small dots from these with a hole punch creating those chads. These chads set aside for later use, she would fabricate her canvas. In some instances she folded six to eight inch wide canvas strips over and under one another in a woven pattern, sort of like a basket and the intersecting vertical and horizontal lines formed a grid. And there's also a grid in the works where she's not folding them. So, sometimes it's just little squares or rectangles that they form a grid or a partial grid. And this is very much visible when you're standing in front of one of the works in person. Pindell then hand sewed the pieces of fabric to form a seam ridden and slightly irregular field and you can see the thread in some portions of the canvas. And at this stage she would apply thick layers of paint and then extrude them through a hole punch stencil, so they're like these tiny little plateaus of encrusted paint on the surface. And next the delicate work of collaging the previously painted chads began. So, she took those bags of chads and she individually lodged thousands of them into globs of paint, layering them atop one another, on their sides and in the seams of canvas, using tweezers and photo -- and dry photo matt spray. More layers of paint, a careful application of glitter, sequence, sometimes also cat hair swept from her studio and a final dousing of what she has called, quote, "All kinds of cheap perfume," completed the paintings. Whose finished surfaces, although they would seem to be really friable, are actually pretty stable. The basic structure of the woven paintings, long strips of canvas, and interlaced into a horizontal/vertical relationship, resembles Kente cloth. The most recognizable of African textiles, which can dull and sense be woven on narrow looms in Kumasi, Ghana. And can dull herself has remarked on this resemblance. Though the term Kente can be applied to a wide variety of textiles, patterns and techniques, it traditionally refers to a strip woven textile used as festive dress and royal regalia by the Asante people of Ghana and Ewe. I'm sorry, of Ghana and Ewe people of Ghana and Toga. So, this cloth consists of three to four inch wide strips of cotton or silk sewn together in an alternating over/under pattern to create textiles of various sizes. In her decision to interfold portions of her canvases, Pindell advanced a fiber based approach to the medium of painting. But she did so while mostly maintaining rectilinear format points to the facts that the material support of much of modernist art is, of course, a textile canvas. She was aided in seeing the residences between African textiles and modernist painting by the exhibition at MOMA, where the cloths were hung in ways that made them immediately visually accessible. Which is a convention of modern art display. Rather than conveying their bodily use and African context. And, in fact, the exhibition traveled to Los Angeles and there some of the textiles were draped on mannequins, so they were displayed in a way that emphasized their use in African context more. But not here at New York, in New York where Pindell saw it. ^M00:30:10 ^M00:30:13 Give Pindell's relish for African art, it is notable that throughout the 1970s her paintings conveyed her interest exclusively through material means. Particularly through their dense and loose hanging textures. This tactic contrasted with ideologies of black art that were being generated at the time. Beginning in the late 1960s, agents of the black arts movement, the cultural arm of the broader nationalist black power movement called for art forms that would, quote, stand for the spiritual helpmate of the black nation. The urgent need for revolutionary cultural consciousness, required black artists to work collectively to supplant the images, values and associations of a dominant white American culture with capital B black culture. African imagery, such as the outline of the continent against Pan-African colors in Nelson Stevens, "Jihad Nation," which we see on the right, played an important role in these efforts at artistic and political consolidation. For a black artist to explicitly evoke Africa in her work at the beginning of the decade of the 1970s, was to bring or to risk bringing the politics of black power to the reading of her work. In this same discourse abstract art came to be coded as racially white. Poet and imminent black arts promoter, Amiri Baraka, for instance, argued that, quote, "Non-political black artists, those who did not generate overtly political content, did not exist in the black world at all, but belonged entirely in the tradition of white art." An abstract artist with very few exceptions were assigned to this category of the non-political. Art historian Darby English, has noted that frequent characterizations of abstraction as irrelevant to black experience, limited the range of officially legitimated artistic means that were available to black artists and thereby established a very exclusionary basis for black art. Black artists working abstractly were admonished b y spokespeople for the black arts movement as lacking political sophistication or castigated as capitulating to their oppressor's cultural taste. So, this characterization of abstraction probably feels overly constraining to the present day audience. But we do well to remember that as conceptual artist, Charles Gaines, has reflected, quote, "Part of the black experience of modernism was that historically it was an ideology that helped discriminate against minority inclusion in the art world of the 1960s and the 1970s." the abstract art on view in New York's museums and gallery was overwhelmingly produced by white artists and it was only thanks to the militant activism of artists, writers and critics that museums began in the late 1960s to devote significant gallery space to artists such as Alma Thomas, Sam Loving and Al Lux -- Sam Gilliam and Al Loving. ^M00:33:39 ^M00:33:46 So, given this context, what was an abstract artist with an affinity for African culture to do? Despite frustrations with her reception, Pindell continued to make paintings that offered no apparent commentary on black experience. Producing unstretched collage canvases and later the cotton sewn works. However, over the course of the 1970s she began increasingly to turn to texture as a non-figurative technique, for conveying both a conscious and what she has called an unconscious ancestral connection to Africa and its visual art, visual arts. This extra visual strategy I argued allowed her to intertwine her ongoing development of a modernist painting practice and growing artistic concern for aspects of her social identity that did not conform to the normative category of abstract artist. Which as I've indicated by default was white and white male subject positon. According to Pindell, her encounter in African textiles with a charm and emulate encrusted batakari, or war tunic, spurred her to experiment with dense accumulative textures. Small works on map or made shortly after the exhibition, display her first efforts at lifting collage elements off the two dimensional surface. Clusters of chads pile on top of sewing thread that forms a grid. Some of the hole punched scraps even balance improbably on their paper thin edges, kind of sticking out from the board. The accreted surface of these works evokes though on a smaller scale the adherence of packets, horns and shells to the batakari. And with the cut and sewn paintings, Pindell first applied this laboriously achieved lifted collage technique on a large scale at dimensions that would evoke both modernist paintings and African textiles. But it was the psychic resonances of the accumulative textures in African objects, as much as their visual affects, that drew Pindell to them. In African context, including the Ghanaian culture of Akan, which produced the batakari, accumulations on the surface of the objects have apotropaic and empowering functions for the wearer. Pindell adapted this concept to her own work using the term, "Surface tension," to describe what she understood as the, quote, "empowering function of her collaged paintings, whose textural qualities offered a non-dominating orientation toward the viewer." The unintuitive connection Pindell has drawn between texture and empowering affects is probably best illustrated through a negative example that she provides. Surface tension contrasts with the manufactured finish of works, such as Richard Serra's Cor-ten steel sculptures, whose vast surfaces, although they are textured by the metal's protective weathered layer, lack traces of the artist's hand. Pindell believes that through their scale, which is quite large, and repudiation of human labor, such works propose a dominate or disempowering orientation toward the viewer. The artist has removed himself in some significant way from the surface of his sculpture. Surface tension, by contrast, is capable of ensuring viewers instant recognition of the artwork as a human creation, by indirectly placing the artist herself on the surface of her works. By awakening our tactile curiosity with their dense textures, Pindell thought to make artworks that did not alienate or diminish their viewers. As clear theorist, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, "The sense of touch," quote, "makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity, because to touch is," quote, "also to understand other people or natural forces as having effectually done so before oneself, if only in the making of the textured object." End quote. Each chad on a cut and sewn painting indexes a squeeze of Pindell's hand against a hole punch, and a subsequent meticulous application of tweezers. A direct textural recording of these past moments of creation further communicates to the viewer that someone was here before us, someone left these traces. Further, black feminist art historians have noticed that the tactile and haptic have played important roles in the cultural production of women of the African Diaspora. And Pindell has herself identified surface tension as a common feature of works by African diasporic artists. Huey Copeland argues that black women have long, quote, "turned to the haptic as a resource for self fashioning and for the preservation of memories otherwise lost to history." End quote. A haptic can serve at once as a supplement to the visual and a refuge from it, providing a sight of personal and communal self-fashioning. In this light we night understand Pindell's turn toward texture as participating in a black women's cultural tradition that addresses the denigrating terms imposed by euro American scopic regimes or what cultural critic, Michelle Wallace, has called the, quote, "Negative -- excuse me -- negative scene of instruction out of the visual," which traditionally cast black women in stereotype. Pindell's theory of surface tension implicated her own bodily relationship to the surface of her works, in addition to her viewers. She has remarked that the extensive handiwork involved in the painting's fabrication, punching, the cutting, stitching, helped her weather the constant disapproval she encountered as a black woman artist and curator. This disapproval included the sense that to the larger art world she, quote, "Didn't exist." The cumulative traumatic stress of these conditions led to experiences of what Pindell has described as dissociation, during which she felt, quote, "Out of her body." Tactile intensive work in particular the process of punching, of hole punching intervened, serving as a process the rough which the artist could, quote, "Connect with her body when it no longer cohered as a result of fractious social pressures." Pindell's textural engagement with the surface of her works became, in her estimation, a tool for, quote, "Healing, that gave her the energy to continue to make art and show up at her day job." ^M00:41:14 ^M00:41:18 Repetitive labor may strike us as an unlikely strategy for combating isolation. The hand cramping work of hole punching a curious practice for bodily restoration. Pindell's use of physically intensive processes, in particular her extensive use of an instrument associated with bureaucratic procedure, the hole punch, placed her work in the leading discussions of conceptual arts and referenced her post at MOMA as a white collar worker. Unlike many of the artists who turn to an aesthetic of administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pindell was herself a practicing bureaucrat. In fact, she punched some of her chads from manila folders that she pilfered from MOMA. There's also the matt boards that we see, that is the ground for the work on the left. She got out of the dumpster at MOMA. They were cut out of mats that were used to frame artworks. So, Pindell's intimate knowledge of administrative labor throws new light on the idea expressed by artist Sol LeWitt in 1967 and who's an example of whose work we see here. That under the logic of conceptual art, quote, "The aim of the artist would be to give the viewer information. He would follow his predetermined premise to its conclusion, avoiding subjectivity. Chance, taste or unconsciously remembered forms would play no part in the outcome." End quote. Pindell's premise with the cut and sewn paintings was not that of the cataloging clerk, as Lewitt suggests. By endowing administrative materials with aesthetic intent and more radically the possibility for psychic redemption or healing, she put pressure on a model of the bureaucratic artistic laborer as lacking subjectivity. Rather she submitted the administrative tools of the hole punch and file folder to a process or set of rules of her own devising. Perhaps as a black woman, Pindell felt she could not afford to forsake her claims to a general authority, as some conceptual artists did. For in rarified fields of cultural production, black women, in the words of Wallace, quote, "Are systematically denied the most visible forms of discursive and intellectual subjectivity." End quote. In Pindell's paintings the durational and physical aspects of handiwork could function as an erasure gesture through which to assert, rather than renounce her authorship. Just want to check time. Okay. The cut and sew paintings do not hue closely to a bureaucratic aesthetic however. Rather, they couch industrial materials, such as paper and string in the craft processes of collage, sewing and weaving. The tension between the body and machine captured by the cut and sewn paintings didn't -- textures, speak to those forms ongoing entanglements under late capitalism. And it does so against the heralding of technological innovations that would putatively reduce the role of labor in daily life. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given this skepticism about modern labor, Pindell's primary interlockers as she developed the techniques used in the cut and sew paintings were fellow feminist artists. In 1972, as you'll recall, from my introduction, she cofounded A.I.R. Here Pindell could share her ideas about abstraction, situate herself in an artistic discourse and garner opportunities to show her work. Significantly for the later development of the cut and sewn paintings, her formal entry into this feminist art circle emboldened her to embrace feminine coded aesthetics for the first time. The cut and sewn paintings are strikingly feminine. Pindell's use of materials and craft processes, such as sewing and weaving, which create a surface that resembles piecework or a quilt, can be situated in broader feminist efforts to reclaim a cultural practices historically associated with women, which had been disparaged in modernist criticism. The cut and sewn canvases convey femininity in ways that evoke feminine bodily adornment. In Carnival at Ostende, areas of opalescent sheen, which are reminiscent of cartographically masses are distributed across a pale pink field. I realize this probably doesn't register, but you'll have to take my word for it. And in each of the hues, sorry, each of the canvasses, pastel hues, like peach, pink, lavender, baby blue or buttercream, are the first color we see. It's only when we get closer that we see those more saturated colors. And their surfaces are collaged with cheerfully colorful confetti like chads and dusted with glitter and sequence that catch ambient light, creating the impression as one commentator has noted that the paintings wink at you as you walk by them. Originally feminine odors bolstered these visual cues, as I mentioned, Pindell spritzed the canvasses with cheap perfume, which carried class, as well as gender associations. The scent created an atmosphere around the works, where viewers could take them in a kind of literal sense, because smell entails the incorporation of visible particles into the body. Scent amplified the feminine presents of the paintings and activated them as surrogate bodies. The perfume brought another haptic residence to the paintings, reaching out and touching the viewer. The conspicuous artificiality of the paintings glitter sequence and perfume proposed a femininity that is put, self-made and exaggerat4ed. Even though those markers are also subdued and this abstract composition that muffles their flirtation with camp. This sidelong approach to femininity contrasts with the more literal searches for viable feminists -- feminine aesthetics undertaken by feminist artists, such as Miriam Schapiro in these years. Pindell's presentation of bedazzled surfaces also reminds us that for her and other women of color artists working in the context of 1970s feminisms, notions of femininity were complicated by the implicit racialization of womanhood by voluble white feminists, who took their experiences as women to be representative. And, again, really disavowed the idea that women of color, the experiences of the women of color around racism had anything to do with what it meant to be a woman. With this in view, the paintings tongue in cheek feminine aesthetic might signal a covert black feminist politics, and not only modernist criticism, but also at accounts of femininity that appealed to gender nature and thereby served to uphold racially exclusionary notions of womanhood. Finally, one of the more provocative aspects of Pindell's approach to feminist art was her adamant use of modernist forms. Such as all over abstraction and the grid. At the end of the 1970s Lupard famously voiced the widespread view that feminism was antithetical to modernism and her reflection that quote, "Feminisms greatest contribution to the future of art has probably been precisely its lack of contribution to modernism." End quote. Without an easily identifiable and unequivocal message, abstract art was viewed at times as a masculinist modernist holdover by feminist artist. Black women artists then were addressed by the demands of black arts leaders and feminists to work in figuratively and expressly political modes. Artists Adrian Piper's remarks that she made abstract work, quote, "In the Garden of Eden before she found out she was a black woman," end quote, suggests both a naiveté that these cultural discourses imposed on black women abstractionists and also the sobering reality that their decisions to work abstractly could result in dismissal or other forms of artistic exile. To conclude, the cut and sew paintings bring together what we've often thought of as irreconcilable forms of labor. The paperwork of bureaucracy, craft procedures, the routines of feminine bodily adornment, and the seclusion of modernist studio painting. But each of these speaks to Pindell's effortful movement through the world. They give us no clear, singular or fixed sense of where to place them or the artist. Rather through their use of texture and their overlaying of the modernist grid can take cloth and the quilt. The cuttings from paintings surface the tensions that Pindell encountered in artistic discourses of the 1970s. They knot and make less comfortable supposed antinomies of late 20th century art, so as those posited between African cultural affinities, feminist commitments and modernist things. Looking at them 40 years after they were made they ask us what possibilities and constraints we continue to assign to art and how these are mapped onto the variously bodied people who make it. We have a lot to learn from their questions. Thank you. ^M00:52:08 [ Applause ] ^M00:52:16 Great, thank you all so much. So, we do have a few minutes for questions. I will have to repeat the question, so just so you know for the microphone, but yeah. >> You said after the accident she was doing -- using the art to improve her memory, help her improve her memory or recall her memories. >> Yeah. >> Was that a known therapy recommended by the doctor or some person [inaudible] on their own? >> Good question. So, the question was about after Pindell had her car accident she was using post cards and other materials to sort of restore memory function, was that something that doctors had recommended or something she pioneered? My understanding is this was something she was grappling through herself and was kind of intuiting that she could make connections between people and places and past events using images. I haven't heard her talk about being something that was specifically advised to her by a doctor or someone else, but I'm not sure. It's really interesting that this is -- basically she adapts this therapeutic process, something that she's not doing into the context of her art and introduces it into the paintings. And something I'm kind of interested in thinking through with the dissertation as a whole is how actually the abstract works are also -- she's also thinking about these as being -- and the labor involved in them as being sort of therapeutic on some level. Though that's less about imagery and memory per se. Yeah, right here. >> Do you know anything about whether relationships were like with other black female artists were working at that time? >> Yeah. >> Because her position at MOMA would have seemingly removed her to a certain extent? >> Right, great. Excellent questions. So, the question was about if I -- what kinds of relationships Pindell had with other black women artists at this time. Yeah, so, it's interesting because there other black women artists obviously working in New York in the 1970s and including black women artists working in abstraction. She does become friends with Beverly Buchanan. They are in conversation. She's good friends with Ari Stooksoms [phonetic spelling] who is a curator, not an artist. She seems not to have formed a real artistic community with someone like Faith Ringgold or Dindga McCannon or other women who are in where we at who are sort of adapting a black arts movement, sort of format to their experiences as black women in her working figuratively and are less interested, I think, in the modernist inflected work that Pindell's doing. But, yeah, it's very -- the question of the sort of different artistic communities she moves through in the 1970s is complex, because she gets shown in so many different kinds of context. Largely through feminist shows and she's often the only woman of color in those groups, including in A.I.R. for the first several years, she was the only black woman in that group and she starts to feel like she's really being tokenized by the feminist movement. But it's also -- this is also the context in which she's getting the most opportunities to show her work. But, yes, absolutely she was aware of and talking to and thinking about the work of other black women artists. I think that she was probably looking at Betty Blayton's round paintings and kind of interested in exploring that more. Thank you. Yes, right here. >> You didn't mention Jackson Pollock exclusively, but you did have an image of Pollock in it. >> Yeah. >> And I'm wondering to what extent would her work with surface tension be seen as an implicit critique or [inaudible] to Pollock or maybe even to Koenig, who I also think of as having a lot of -- because it's almost like she's saying, "You can't just spill paint on a canvas, first you have to sew the canvas and then you have to carefully elaborate [inaudible]. I know you have to repeat that, sorry. >> Yeah, no, it's okay. I'll paraphrase. The question was about Jackson Pollock, because I had an image of his work up and if and how Pindell's was maybe thinking through the drip -- if I can paraphrase so much. I included that installation view because that exhibition was on view when Pindell started at MOMA and she has talked about that feeling like she had really like been immersed in the center of the art world, that she was basically being asked to be a gopher for those shows. It was being de-installed when she started. I think that compositionally the drip paintings are one sort of important touchstone in thinking about how Pindell gets to the all -- what's called -- known as "All Over Abstraction," that she's doing in the cut and sewn painting. Where there is not a sort of pictorial center of gravity, it's sort of an even treatment all over. She certainly thinking about that legacy and she's certainly having a very different relationship to her canvas than someone like Pollock who isn't touching the actual canvas, for the, you know, the majority of the process is kind of at this remove and above it and she's really getting involved in this very detailed way. Which, of course, is also gendered, right, detailed work is gendered feminine and I think that's important for part of the critique she is offering here. Do we have time for -- should we cut it? Okay. >> You can do one more. >> Okay, Hannah. >> Thanks, that was great. My question was, in your discussion of administrative paperwork, [inaudible] the byproducts of administrative paperwork. So, I was just wondering what you think the stakes are of -- as compared to conceptualized, that really is using like the true administrative form, she's using the material and not only the material, but the byproduct material with it. >> Yeah, I think this comes -- I think my argument probably comes more in to view in the more extended -- oh, sorry, I was supposed to repeat the question. It was about -- the question was about administrative labor and specifically how the chads are the byproduct of administrative labor, rather than the actual kind of form that a lot of conceptual artists were using in the early 1970s. So, I think in the context of the fuller scope of her body this actually comes into view more, because she first starts working with chads when she is numbering them with ink and then collaging them onto graph paper in this very orderly fashion. And I think in that instance she is actually kind of like replicating make riffing on making her own kind of cataloguing. If an illogical cataloging process. And, so, I'm trying to think about how she develops this different kind of relationship to the chad. I think that it sticks around because that was a really formative practice and I think that the sort of stakes and questions are on materiality and bureaucratic labor are really interesting to her, even as she continues to make the cut and sewn painting. But your point is well taken. It is very kind of abstracted from that context in these works. Okay. That's it, thank you all so much for being here. ^M01:01:12 [ Applause ] ^M01:01:16 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:01:22