Processing the Eternal Present: Howardena Pindell and the Art of Risk

A lecture by Kirsten Buick

Visiting art historian Kirsten Buick will speak on the work of Howardena Pindell, currently on view in the major retrospective Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen. For over fifty years, Howardena Pindell (American, b. 1943) has made lasting change as an artist, activist, scholar, professor, and cultural critic. Pindell, in her many guises, moves fluidly between art academies, universities, museums, galleries, and the street because she must. In the words of Audre Lorde:

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths."

Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), p. 112.

 

Please join us for this lecture on Pindell’s practice. Preceding the talk, and beginning at 1 pm, the artist will be available to sign copies of her exhibition’s catalog, which is available for purchase at the front desk of the museum.

Kirsten Buick is a Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico. She has published extensively on African American art and been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Pre-Doctoral Fellowship and the Charles Gaius Bolin Fellowship at Williams College. She has taught at the University of New Mexico since 2001, where she specializes in art of the U.S.; African American art; gender and race as they impact the historiography of art; representations of the American landscape; and the history of women as patrons and collectors of the arts. Her book, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject, is published by Duke University Press. Her second book, In Authenticity: ‘Kara Walker’ and the Eidetics of Racism, is in progress.