Howardena Pindell talks to The New York Times

Once on the margins, older African-American artists are suddenly a hot commodity. They are relishing the attention while dealing with the market’s grueling demands. By Hilarie M Sheets

… Ms. Pindell’s breakthrough came in 2014… since then a survey of her work has appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and is now on view at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum.

But as a black abstract artist, Ms. Pindell found an inhospitable reception in New York after graduating from Yale in 1967. She was bucking the widespread expectation that African-American artists should create work about social issues.

“Within the African-American community in the 1970s, if you were an abstract artist you were considered the enemy pandering to the white world,” said Ms. Pindell. “But white dealers would say that African-Americans who did abstract work were inauthentic.”

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Image: Portrait of Howardena Pindell

Photograph: © Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times