Howardena Pindell: Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts, 1988. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 118x 71 in. Wadsworth Atheneum Collection. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.
BLVRD Features recently released an augmented reality experience exploring a stunning and powerful multi-media work by Howardena Pindell entitled Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts , from the Wadsworth Atheneum with whom we developed this exciting project.
An important American artist, activist, curator, and educator, Pindell has always marched to the beat of her own drum. For over five decades, her trailblazing voice and wide-ranging experimental artistic practice have shaped the discourse around process and politics in contemporary art. Pindell’s art demands that we pay as much attention to the creative process as the human condition. Very often her work addresses the intersection of racism, feminism, and oppression. Even Pindell’s more seemingly subtle abstractions, however, not only engage us with textural provocation, but are (figuratively) interwoven with probing questions about the nature of beauty and the divine, collectivity, and life’s value and meaning.
Part of the artist’s larger “Autobiography” series, Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts (1988) is a massive canvas (well over 9 ft. high), which as its title suggests, is complexly layered in terms of Pindell’s collage process, as well as her poignant, at time hauntingly confrontational, signifiers of identity, experience, and history – both deeply personal and collective.
Working with the Wadsworth team to create a mini AR experience that would allow us to share this large-scale remarkable work for audiences anywhere, and to “open it up” for them, was an exciting challenge and an absolute joy for Boulevard Arts. And, its wonderfully serendipitous that NYC’s artspace The Shed is currently hosting a terrific solo exhibition of the artist’s work, entitled Howardena Pindell: Rope/Fire/Water!