Howardena Pindell: ‘I could have died – that’s when I decided to express my opinion in my work’

The African American artist has been making powerful, political work since the late 70s. As a new exhibition in Edinburgh shows, she still has plenty to say

Howardena Pindell’s art can seem as if it were made by two separate people. There are the huge canvases where stencilled dots or tiny, hole-punched discs of paper amass like drifts of leaves, which she began making while working as MoMA’s first African American curator in 1970s New York. And then there’s the work that has challenged social injustice with a gut-punch directness since the 80s.

It is clear, though, speaking with the 78-year-old ahead of her first UK solo exhibition in a public gallery, that her swirling abstract constellations are not entirely devoid of politics. As a young curator, she’d seen artists with museum day jobs give up their creative lives. Not her. She found time for painting because “the racism [at MoMA at the time] meant I was left out of certain activities. I loved being an artist and I had the stamina to work at night.”

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