On April 23, Landmarks will celebrate the opening of Autobiography: Circles, a monumental new work by artist Howardena Pindell. Commissioned for the College of Education, the installation features a multistory abstract design that is fused into the newly-renovated glass façade of the George I. Sánchez Building. The project represents Pindell’s first exterior public work and first public art commission in Texas.
A pioneering artist, curator, and educator, Pindell was born in 1943 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was raised in a family that valued education and intellectual rigor; her mother worked as a chemist and her father as a mathematician, instilling in her an early appreciation for both creative and analytical ways of thinking. Pindell studied painting at Boston University, earning her BFA in 1965, before completing her MFA at Yale University in 1967. Upon graduating, Pindell joined the Museum of Modern Art in New York, advancing from Exhibition Assistant to Assistant Curator in the Department of National and International Traveling Exhibitions, and later to Associate Curator and Acting Director in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, becoming the museum’s first African American curator. In 1979, she began teaching at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, extending her influence to generations of artists through education. Her work as an artist, which spans five decades, has been the subject of major exhibitions including a comprehensive retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018), as well as significant presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Tate Modern.
In 1979, Pindell was involved in a serious, near-fatal car accident that resulted in head trauma and partial memory loss. During her recovery, she began gathering and reassembling fragments of her past as a form of both rehabilitation and reflection—an effort that led to the Autobiography series, on which Landmarks’ project is based. At the same time, Pindell’s Untitled series of the 1970s and 1980s featured meticulously constructed paintings and collages composed of thousands of hand-punched paper dots that are stitched and layered across the surface. Together, these series reveal Pindell’s ability to expand the language of abstraction, infusing it with history, politics, and the enduring presence of the self.
Drawing from visual motifs across her career, Pindell’s commission for Landmarks features colorful, constellation-like patterns that span four stories of the Sánchez Building façade. The project offers a rare opportunity to encounter Pindell’s work in a public, architectural context, bringing her language of abstraction into daily dialogue with the campus community.
To celebrate the project, Landmarks will host a public talk with Valerie Cassel Oliver, curatorial contributor to the project, who will offer insight into Pindell’s life and practice. Hosted April 23 at 4:30 PM in the Sanchez Building, the lecture is free and open to all.