Chioke L'Anson (left), faculty-in-residence at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, and Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Francis Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the VMFA, discuss the work of artist Howardena Pindell. (Photo by Lauren Francis)
Though the "Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen" exhibition recently closed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, it still echoes with its co-curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, who loved hearing people say how amazing it was to walk through history to get to her work, which was on display in the museum's 21st Century Gallery and its Evans Court Gallery.
Oliver, the VMFA's Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, spoke with VCU Assistant Professor and Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU Faculty-in-Residence Chioke I’Anson last night as part of the ICA's “For the Love of Art” series. The talk about Pindell’s work as an artist, curator and activist was rescheduled from October due to Hurricane Michael. Pindell's exhibition, which ran through last weekend, encompassed the layered, textured work of the artist's 50-year career and was co-curated by Naomi Beckwith from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
“Sometimes you need a hero to ask the dumb questions,” said I’Anson as he opened the evening. He asked Oliver to break down Pindell’s abstract work, the role of curators, and what institutions can do to foster diversity and support young curators. As a curator, Oliver shared that she sees herself as a conduit among artists, community and audience, and that curation allows for the exploration of context.
Pindell’s work came onto the art scene in the early 1960s, when artists were focused on minimalism and geometric figures. The circular form became a persona for Pindell, Oliver said. As a young girl, the artist went to Ohio with her parents to visit extended family. When her father took a sip of his root beer, she noticed that there was a small dot at the bottom of his mug. She realized that hers had the same dot, and she asked her father about it. He explained that black people and white people didn’t drink out of the same cups, and these dots were how the business kept track of which cups were for whom.
An abstract circular form reverberates throughout Pindell's work, from her father’s ledgers to the repurposed canvases she stitched together to create many of her large-scale works. “She didn’t rid herself of representation in the frame, even though it's abstract,” Oliver explained.
Eight months after an accident that caused Pindell significant memory loss, she created the video "Free, White and 21," in which she bitingly recalled the racism that she experienced in the art world, from being the only black person in her M.F.A. program at Yale to being the first full-time black curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
“You may be [with a certain] institution, but does it foster your vision?” asked Oliver, considering nominal diversity and support for young curators at some institutions. “I would not have left Houston to come here if I didn’t feel I would be able to do the work.”