My name is Valerie Cassel Oliver, and I am the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts located in Richmond, Virginia. 

In 2017, I, along with Naomi Beckwith organized a major exhibition of works by the artist Howardena Pindell. The exhibition entitled, What Remains to be Seen, was a retrospective, encompassing 50 years of the artist’s practice which included paintings, works on paper as well as sculpture.   

Born in 1943 in Philadelphia; Howardena earned an BFA from Boston University in 1965 and later, a MFA from Yale University in 1967. Over the long arc of her career her, Pindell has honed a style steeped in activism and characterized by her unique use of geometry, in particular confetti-like circles and discs created using a hole punch. Whether accumulated onto the surfaces of paper, or paintings, the circle has become a visual language for the artist bridging abstraction with personal narrative.   

Pindell’s use of the circle was drawn from a childhood memory of a trip taken with her parents to Kentucky in the early 1950s. Stopping at a local root beer stand, she remembered drinking from a mug with a big red circle placed at the bottom, marking it as one to only be used by people of color. For her the circle became a “scary thing” that would preoccupy her subconscious asserting itself into the work where, over time, she would become at ease with its presence, essentially, repairing the rupture of her childhood. 

In this work, Autobiography: Circles, Pindell revisits the circle in this monumental work commissioned for Landmarks, a public art program at the University of Texas, at Austin. Autobiography: Circles marks the artist’s first major public artwork. 

The work draws directly from the visual language that shaped Pindell’s practice for decades. Some of the circles are scanned from earlier works, carrying with them material traces of her past. Others are newly made for the commission,  extending her language into the present. The result is a living structure that holds multiple temporalities at once. At this stage of her life, the act of looking back is inseparable from the act of continuing forward. 

Its placement at the College of Education is not incidental. The college’s mission—to build thriving communities through social mobility, education, and well-being—finds a powerful resonance in Pindell’s life and work. For decades she has been a dedicated educator, leading a MFA program at Stony Brook University, where she taught for more than forty years. In this context, Autobiography: Circles participates in the activities happening inside the building and supports its purpose. It meets a daily audience of students, educators, and visitors, offering a visual language that affirms the possibility of change. 

Installed on the glass façade of the College of Education building, Autobiography: Circles assumes a new clarity and purpose. Using a ceramic frit process, pigment is fused into the glass to fix each mark in place while allowing colored light to illuminate the building. Glass, a medium long associated with spiritual architecture, is one that Pindell has long wanted to explore. Here she realizes that ambition in a work she has described as a legacy project. 

Looking through the glass from the building’s interior, another work comes into view. Ellsworth Kelly’s chapel is situated nearby on the grounds of the museum and, the proximity is striking. Both artists are contemporaries, both committed to abstraction and deeply engaged with color and form–Kelly using the square and Pindell, the circle.  And, the circle remains a constant for Pindell.  It is a form that carries memory and marks presence.  

Autobiography: Circles becomes a structure through which the past is held and the future imagined. Fixed in glass and animated by light, the work registers change and responds to its surroundings, offering movement toward a future still in formation. For every action, there is a response—one that shapes the direction of society and unfolds in the lives of those who pass through it.