What Remains To Be Seen
Howardena Pindell at MCA Chicago
One of our favorite sayings was gifted by designer Tim Gunn: Make it work. Running out of time? Make it work. Can’t decide between lovers? Make it work. If you find yourself between hard places you make it work, and if you’re Howardena Pindell, you make it work because that’s the only choice you’re given.
Pindell endured a devastating car accident in 1979, which resulted in short-term amnesia. Coupled with racist times, Pindell countered her truculent circumstances with art. Now, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents the first major survey of her multidisciplinary work in a new exhibition, What Remains to Be Seen, opening February 24 and running through May 20, 2018.
Pindell’s mixed media pieces harness materials that feel remarkably fresh, including glitter, perfume, and the meticulous, labor-intensive paper circles created by hole punches. Her conceptual abstract paintings relay her point of view surrounding the social and political zeitgeists of her life to date. She elevates delicious colors and craft-room-dust-bin materials to poignancy, and presents them in a way that makes viewers question how wasteful their own actions have been.
What Remains To Be Seen spans Pindell’s half-century-long career and features early figurative paintings, photography, and drawings, as well as recent work from the last two years. Contemporary conversations around equality and diversity mirror those from fifty years ago and lend relevance to old and new work alike. Her creations glint at you from across a room and hug you with their fragrance like a wise godmother in a room full of strangers – one who’s seen just about everything.
It works.
