Both/And: Howardena Pindell and Lorraine O’Grady in Focus
By Jamie Danis, 12 December 2023
Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction, by Sarah Louise Cowan, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022, 271pp., 98 col. and 12 b. & w. illus., hardback, £45
Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language, by Stephanie Sparling Williams, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021, 228pp., 16 col. and 44 b. & w. illus., hardback, £42
Howardena Pindell and Lorraine O’Grady stand at the forefront of a generation of Black American women artists whose groundbreaking, multi-decade, multidisciplinary careers are only now receiving sustained critical attention. Two new books, Sarah Louise Cowan’s Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction and Stephanie Sparling Williams’s Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language, are leading contributions to this critical turn, each the first major scholarly monograph written about its respective artist. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, given that Pindell and O’Grady both began working as artists in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, Cowan and Sparling Williams address common thematic concerns for the two artists; particularly notable are recurrent interests in family histories and genealogies, an emphasis on durational procedures (often introduced or emphasised through their shared use of sewing or other craft methods), and attention to the legacies of modernism (for Pindell) and the avant-garde (for O’Grady). Both artists also taught and curated exhibitions, though the depth of Pindell’s investment in these fields is substantially greater, with a storied twelve-year curatorial career at MoMA followed by a four-decade teaching career at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Both artists likewise have deeply committed research and writing practices that parallel and inform their artistic ones, have participated in artistic collectives including the Guerrilla Girls, and steadily continued their work despite consistent discrimination and exclusion. ( … )