Howardena Pindell (American, b. 1943) 

Katrina, 2005 

Offset lithograph, ed. 66/80 

26 7/8 x 21 1/8 in. 

Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, St. Petersburg College, gift of James G. Sweeny in memory of Martha M. Sweeny, 2020.4.37 

Published by Brandywine Workshop and Archives, Philadelphia, PA. Printed by Robert “Bob” Franklin. 

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1943, Howardena Pindell earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Boston University, in 1965, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University in 1967. From 1967 to 1979, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in New York City, and became a curator of Prints and Illustrated Books. She found inspiration for her artwork from MoMA’s collection of Akan batakari tunics in the exhibition African Textiles and Decorative Arts. While working at MoMA, she began to document diverse artists and designers represented in arts institutions throughout New York state. She determined that 90% were white artists and her findings were published ARTnews in 1989. In 1972, Pindell co-founded the A.I.R. Gallery, in Brooklyn, which was the first artist-directed gallery for women artists in the United States. Pindell is a professor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where she has been teaching since 1979. She returned to Yale as a visiting professor in the 1990s. Her work is collected by the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Fogg Museum at Harvard University; High Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; among many others. 

As a painter, printmaker, collage-maker, and performance artist, Pindell’s work expresses issues of racism, feminism, human rights, and spirituality. Her process-oriented work often focuses on destruction and reconstruction, resulting in abstract, nuanced textured surfaces. The directional arrows, as seen in this Katrina lithograph, first appeared in Pindell’s “video drawings” in the 1970s. Her Video Drawings were comprised of arrows and words drawn on acetate that were overlayed and clung to the surface of a television screen with static electricity, which she then photographed. Suffering from severe memory loss from a car accident in 1979, her work became more autobiographical, in part as an effort to help herself heal. After her accident, her Video Drawings became powerful statements on politics and mass media. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago organized Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen, in 2018, which featured five decades of her Video Drawings. One of her most recent works from the series, Video Drawings: News (2007) featured news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, in which she overlayed acetate with arrows going in haphazard directions onto an image of a CNN meteorologist describing the projected path of the devastating hurricane.  

Pindell printed Katrina (2005) at the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, where she said: 

I like working with arrows and the unconsciousness. After Katrina, I realized I had drawn the footprint and a storm, specifically a hurricane. I did the drawings on Mylar several months before Katrina and kept adding to it. 

In this video from Brandywine Workshop, Pindell discusses her work while planning out Katrina: