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The Story of American Racism This Artist Couldn’t Tell in the 1970s
An interview with 77-year-old Howardena Pindell about her new exhibition ‘Rope/Fire/Water’
As a child, while visiting a friend whose mother was cooking meat for dinner, Howardena Pindell came across a recent issue of Life magazine. Inside the issue, a large photo of a Black man lying face-up on a log, set on fire, caught her eye. She took deeper notice of the White men surrounding the burning body, and their self-congratulatory smiles. The scent of cooked meat coming from the kitchen, coupled with the horrifying image, led Pindell to do without meat for a year due to instant feelings of fatigue and lethargy. In the early 1970s, as a founder at the A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, Pindell pitched what is now Rope/Fire/Water to a group of White women artists, but was met with denial. Today, her conceptualized idea is on display at the Shed gallery in New York City until April 11, 2021.
Her artwork comes with a warning label for its graphic material, but sadly, none of the material itself has been imagined or self-constructed. Instead, it’s been pulled from the historians and writers who documented the Jim Crow era, as well as personal memories from Pindell’s earlier years. It’s the same material that selectively has been omitted from our textbooks, our…
