Visitors look at the “What Remains to Be Seen” exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Courtesy of VMFA

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Howardena Pindell Photo © Katherine McMahon

Pindell’s colorful mixed media collage "Untitled #5B (Krakatoa)” is named after an Indonesian volcanic island. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery

The title, “What Remains to Be Seen,” aptly describes the new exhibition of Howardena Pindell’s work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It suggests what the under-recognized artist has accomplished over the past five decades, as well as what’s to come.

I also sensed another metaphor when I read a subtitle in the exhibition’s first room, “Cut, Sewn, Adorned.” The themes of discrimination, injustice and hope emerge from Pindell’s exploration of the intersection of art and activism.

“Pindell was among the first wave of academically trained artists to dismiss the separation between pure abstraction and political art,” according to Michael Taylor, VMFA’s deputy director and chief curator for art and education.

“She asserted that the pressures, prejudices and exclusions placed upon her as an African American artist and as a woman — both in the art world and the world at large — were fair and necessary themes to explore in her art.”

Pindell was 21 when the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. Some visitors of her generation, who grew up during the angst of Brown v. Board of Education and experienced oppression firsthand, might not be surprised by how difficult life was for her as a black woman in the 1970s.

What might surprise exhibition visitors who take the time to read the captions about her life is how difficult the situation was for a professional black woman even in New York — and even after having studied painting at Boston University and Yale University.

In listening to Pindell speak at the exhibition’s media preview, as well as chatting with her later in person, I could tell she is a woman of great moral courage and fortitude, not one to back down in the face obstacles.

Gender and racial inequality

Having grown up in Philadelphia, Pindell felt she was an outsider or a second-class citizen in the New York art world in the 1970s. This challenge plays out in her diverse work, which creatively explores how she fought the closed art cliques of that period.

“I got to see the art world from the inside and the outside in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” she said. “Gender inequity existed among blacks as well as whites. Those in power would often say, ‘That’s politics, and we don’t want to talk about politics,’ or ‘That’s feminism, and we don’t want to talk about feminism.’ People would ask, ‘Won’t you please be cooperative?’ which meant, ‘Please shut up.’”

Her ‘cut, sewn, adorned’ works include acrylic or mixed media and punched papers on canvas or board, as well as collages of mixed media on paper.

In 1977, she began making paintings through the new process of using pieces of unstretched canvas sewn together and decorated with materials such as glitter, talcum powder, swing thread and perfume — all to extend the boundaries of painting’s rigid tradition of rectangular canvases.

Her work is infused with evidence of her labor, such as creating rich, layered surfaces by obsessively affixing dots of pigment and paper circles made with an ordinary hole punch. Her use of rich colors and unconventional materials gives her finished works a lush textural and ethereal quality.

“You can imagine what my house is like,” she said. “I never throw anything away. I literally have bags of dots at home.”

Her multifaceted portfolio comprises photography, such as the compelling chromogenic print, “Swimming: (1975), as well as video, film and performance art.

Visitors should make time to watch Pindell’s 1980 12-minute video, “Free, White and 21” — a catch-phrase of white privilege in the 1930s and ‘40s. But the artist uses it, too, as she appears in whiteface and wears a blond wig to illustrate the stark divide between black and white Americans.

Managing memory loss

Pindell experienced a life-threatening car accident in 1979 that left her with partial memory loss. “My work in the studio after the accident,” she said, “helped me to reconstruct missing fragments from the past.”

Her personal and diaristic art includes postcards from her global travels, which she said also helped with her amnesia.

She finds that her present medications also cause her to have memory difficulties: “I keep day-pages in which I consciously try to remember how I felt when I did something on particular days, and I fill out a whiteboard with my daily activities.”

Based on her own experience, she recommends that people visiting Alzheimer’s patients take pictures of family members, friends and specific places during visits to help restore memories of the past.

The VMFA had a record fiscal year in 2017-18, totaling 45,000 members and nearly 700,000 visitors — the seventh-highest among the nation’s art museums.

Effusive in her praise of the VMFA for its inclusiveness, Pindell said she’d also taken out a membership — which museum director Alex Nyerges said, “makes 45,001.”

Whether as a traveler, memoirist or activist, Pindell expresses themes relevant to the arc of her career since the 1960s.

Pindell’s show, which runs until Nov. 25 and is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, is divided between VMFA’s Evans Court (ground floor) and 21st Century (2nd level) galleries, which makes a good organizational plan for visitors interested in the museum’s collection of other African and African-American art.

VMFA is open 365 days a year, Saturday through Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Thursday and Friday until 9 p.m. Admission is free. It is located at 200 N. Blvd., Richmond.

For more information, see www.vmfa.museum or call (804) 340-1400.