SUSAN:

By way of introduction I wanted to mention that up until now Chrysanne and I have always conducted these interviews together and in person. Due to the pandemic, and the fact that Chrysanne and I now live in separate cities, we have embarked, at least for now, on a new strategy. The interview was conducted and recorded over the phone. And unlike in the past, a set of proposed questions was shared in advance. In the past we each took a portrait of the artist, with one image at the head of the interview and one at the tail. This was not possible so we have chosen two still images from Howardena’s extraordinary video, Free, White and 21, shot in 1980, to lead into and close the interview.

CHRYSANNE:

Can you tell us about your early experiences? Did you always want to be an artist? Did you receive support from your family? I noticed that you went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art when you were growing up. Was there a work or works in the museum that had a special meaning for you or that inspired you to become an artist?  

HOWARDENA:

Well, one of my teachers, my third grade teacher, Mrs. Oser, told my parents that I was gifted and she told them to take me to museums and galleries, but there were very few galleries then, and to meet artists, which my parents did. I met both black and white artists, men and women artists. So with the museum, someone called up my parents and said that there was a mummy in the Egyptian wing, and that it looked like me. So my parents took me to the museum and there was an encaustic portrait painting on a linen mummy wrapping that looked like me. That was my first foray into the museum. And then I found that I was very drawn to Duchamp—I was a little kid—but there was something about Duchamp. The two pieces were The Bride Stripped Bare and also, I think the piece was called Why Not Sneeze, it was like a cage with what looked like sugar cubes, but they were marble cubes, inside. So those were my two favorite pieces. The other things I was attracted to, I can’t think of a specific artist, but some Renaissance paintings, and I tried to develop that style, and I just couldn’t do it. 

CHRYSANNE:

The memory which you have spoken about concerning circles, making a circle into a positive symbol after having encountered it in a negative way (which you talked about in reference to traveling with your father in Southern Ohio and Northern Kentucky and finding that there were mugs with red circles on the bottom to designate that the mug was to be used by people of color) is a very meaningful example of how art can transform a negative, into, as you say, a positive experience. Are there other symbols, constructs that you have used in a similar manner?

HOWARDENA:

Well with the circle I also looked at nature: the sun is round, the moon is round, the earth is round. So it’s a very major symbol. Also the circle is not just a geometric form. A red circle scared me. I even found a mug that looked like the one we were given and put a red circle on it, which was about the same size as the circle was, when I was with my father. I found that in my work I have also been interested in the arrow. In my Video Drawings series, I use a lot of arrows and numbers. My father was a mathematician, so I was used to seeing him with a gridded book, and he would write numbers in it. I have no idea what he was writing. The arrow—I don’t know if this is a true influence or not—but I was very good at archery when I went to camp, but who knows? I have also portrayed water in my work a lot and I think that that came from the Middle Passage and what happened during slavery. And I was in a boat going from France to New York, called the Aurelia, and that was in 1964, and it was a student boat. We were caught in a category three hurricane in the middle of the Atlantic. We had sixty-foot waves and 125 m.p.h. winds. I am amazed we didn’t capsize. That was one of the worst experiences of my life. So I find water of use in my work often as something beautiful, like I am trying to undo the memory of it being dangerous. I am fascinated by water and the color of water and the color of frozen water in glaciers. I also as a child would go deep-sea fishing off New Jersey. I was not afraid of the water then even though in retrospect, the water was very choppy.

CHRYSANNE:

Did your experience at Yale inform your practice both as an artist and as a professor?

HOWARDENA:

Well at Yale, I was influenced as an artist; a lot of the emphasis of our MFA program where I teach now is on teaching. I have taught at Stony Brook University on Long Island for over 42 years. (I worked for the Museum of Modern Art for 12 years.) There was no emphasis on teaching at Yale. It was all about being an artist and everyone of course wanted to be famous, and everyone wanted a loft, and whatever. The training for figurative painting—I went to Boston University, and the teacher who influenced me the most in terms of my teaching was a man named Walter Murch. He had a great respect for the students and I remember him as so supportive. He sat down with every student and gave them his total attention. So that is the kind of style I try to follow when I teach.

SUSAN: 

I just wanted to comment how incredibly precocious I think it is that as a tiny child you chose Duchamp as the artist that you liked. After reading in the catalogue produced for your show What Remains to be Seen at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, both Chrysanne and I were stopped short by what the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Ed Spriggs, had said to you about your abstract paintings—that they were “not black art”. Did you respond at the time? He seems to put you in a double bind. While identity politics obviously helped both raise awareness and codify change for minority groups, if identification with a particular group is demanded it also enforces a kind of segregation. You can only be expert at something to do with your own identity and not be a part of the discourse of say—abstract painting, which is the purview of white men. I see you move back and forth often between abstraction and figuration over the course of your career, so I wonder if you can speak to how these approaches allow for different meaning making for you and specifically what abstraction was able to offer that figuration did not?

HOWARDENA:

I’m trying to find a good answer to that question. Ed Spriggs was really, really angry at the African American artists, who, as he would say, go downtown and show with white people or white men. And he is still to this day very angry with me. He doesn’t know how my work has changed. But my work split, when I was in a bad car accident while Donald Kuspit was driving, and a woman drove into oncoming traffic, across the median strip, and I ended up with a concussion. When I realized I had survived it, I wanted to do work which was about autobiographical subjects as well as all as about issues relating to my belief system. So I just switched back and forth between the two. One is that I like to engage beauty. I have been put down for that, actually. And the other is that I wanted to do works that were either about my life or about issues that I was concerned about. And I remember, in terms of the beauty in the work, in the New Art Examiner in Chicago, which is no longer around, there was a review of a show that was held in Chicago, I think at The Renaissance Society, and I used glitter in the work, and the white, male critic said my work was a light show and that he wanted to have sex under my painting. So the issue related work is something I started after the injury. Prior to that I was developing my abstract painting, prior to that, when I was at Boston University, I was a figurative painter, but in the old-fashioned sense.

SUSAN:

Although you had a beautiful and not so old-fashioned palette, with all those great oranges and yellows.

HOWARDENA:

Yes, that was at Yale.

SUSAN:

So you anticipated at least a part of my next question, which was about the beauty in your painting, because when I was in graduate school, in the early 80s, beauty was basically a dirty word.

HOWARDENA:

It was absolutely a dirty word then.

SUSAN:

I also wonder how you felt about and navigated the added pressure not just about beauty but against painting at a time when the reification of white men doing minimalist and later post-minimalist sculpture, a very machismo paradigm, was the central discourse of the art world?

HOWARDENA:

Well, I just kind of made fun of it in a way. There was a piece I made, Untitled, 1968-70, a portable grid. It was, I think, 12’x12’, and what I did was I stuffed a canvas grid, and I used grommets and the rings you would use in a ringed binder, and I just made this giant, flexible, portable grid. So I had my own thoughts about what I wanted to deal with, but the pressure was on to be more minimalist and not have any kind of expression about anything in the work. That was like the men’s approach which was” Look Ma, No hands!!!” It was as of they wanted to make it look like there was no human touch there at all.

SUSAN:

And those men had a lot of their work fabricated, so there really wasn’t a human touch, at least not theirs.

CHRYSANNE:

You worked on the Byars Committee at MoMA to investigate racial exclusion in museum acquisitions and exhibitions. What did you learn from that experience? How did it effect your activism and work? Did it propel you to leave MoMa?

HOWARDENA:

No, it didn’t propel me to leave. What propelled me to leave MoMA was The N (word) Drawings exhibition at Artists Space. I also had a very difficult boss. She was once a print maker, but she was really tough on all of her employees and you always had to sign out to go to the bathroom, or to the library, and if you would stay too long there was the threat she would send someone to get you. I just got tired of working in that environment. I found it too toxic. But the Byars Committee—Betty Blayton Taylor (Childrens’ Art Carnival in Harlem) was on it. I was on it and I had to fight to get on the committee. So what they did was they hired this extremely rich, young man, white, to be the head of the committee naming it after him and then they had an older African American man as his assistant. After the committee did their work, the main outcome was two one-person exhibitions—Romare Bearden and Richard Hunt. I think they also bought the work of some contemporary male African American artists, but then as soon as the committee was over, it was back to business as usual. One fact that you don’t hear too much about is Byars—he committed suicide. And we don’t know if he got blowback or pressure from the people around him, the whites, for doing what he did, that is to be head of a committee that had to do with diversity or if he had his own demons. But that was kind of a shock. After, they went back to business as usual. They installed a work by Bearden in a hallway away from the collection.

Recently, Ann Temkin, she is the current chief curator, has done everything she can to diversify the collection at MoMa and that is the collection that we see, not just the collection that is in the basement or wherever they keep their storage. And when the Museum recently re-opened, I think it was last year, she had hung Mel Edwards near a Jackie Windsor and then she showed the complete The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence and she put Faith Ringgold in a room next to Picasso. I am sure she got blowback, but that didn’t affect her. The problem, after all of that effort, is we now have Covid-19, which shut them down.

SUSAN:

The exhibition at Artists Space The N (word) Drawings (they did not use “N word” but the full word spelled out in the title at that time) by the white artist Donald Newman took place in 1979. The Black Artists Emergency Coalition protested the exhibition, and I have to confess that I was shocked to read the defences mounted by Helene Winer, Craig Owens, and especially Douglas Crimp, who I personally admired, which were frankly outrageous, to the legitimate objections made by black artists. 

HOWARDENA:

They hated me.

SUSAN:

Because you made Free, White and 21 shortly afterward, I wondered if this exhibition and the protest against it were part of the impetus for that work even though the video itself is focused on the relationship of African American women to white feminists? 

HOWARDENA:

(The Artists Space exhibition was in 1979 before I left the Modern. I made the tape in the summer of 1980. I was in the car accident as a passenger in, I think September of 1979 when I was going to Long Island for my new teaching job. I quit the Modern in August 1979, but handed in my resignation in April of 1979.)

Well, it’s a little bit of both. I think the racism I ran into in the women’s movement did influence it and of course The N Drawings did. But frankly, the most racism that I have run into in my life has been from white women. The protests against Artists Space by The Black Artists Emergency Coalition was both Black and white and we did go to Artists Space to see the show as a group and were picketing and the director closed down the gallery and called the police and locked us out. Subsequently, we went back and one of the gallery’s supporters, a young white women artist said to us literally: “How dare you come down here and tell us what to do, this is a white neighbourhood.”

SUSAN: 

Wow. That’s pretty incredible.

HOWARDENA: 

Artists Space had received New York Council for the Arts Expansion Art money, which was designated for reaching out to communities of color. It was used to bring in European artists. At the time I think there was a show of artists from Scotland. So they were looking at diversity within communities from Europe, as opposed to diversity within communities of color, to bring them in under their umbrella. That reminds me also of a time when I was working for an advertising agency, actually run by a black woman, and one of the white workers’ wives called, and I guess the way I talked to her, because I don’t have an accent, “a black accent”, her reaction was: “Who do you think you are, one of us?” I’ve since done a painting with that title. 

SUSAN: 

Actually, as a quick aside, a lot of these kinds of incidents have garnered the label “micro-aggressions”, and I don’t understand what is “micro” about them. This kind of behavior seems so egregious to me and I find the coinage peculiar. I guess I should look into when that phrase gained currency, because these things seem really aggressive. (As I am transcribing this interview I looked up its origin, which came from Chester Pierce, an American psychiatrist who was the first African American full professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and also a consultant to Sesame Street.) While I understand the origin and its intention, I wonder how useful it is to still describe blatant racist behavior this way.

HOWARDENA: 

Oh yes. Well, the whole event at Artists Space, both the outside protest and the inside protest was recorded by Camille Billops, and the Hatch Billops Collection. The documentation is now at Emory University in Atlanta, in their library. Sadly both she and her husband have recently passed away. We had a teach-in about The N (word) Drawings at their loft on Broadway and Broome Street. The event was multi-racial and the documents are, as mentioned earlier, at Emory University. (The archive in the library is part of a larger archive of American culture. Their collection of research materials on African American visual and performing arts includes, as well, people of color in general. Assembled over forty years, The Hatch Billops Collection is one of the major archives of its kind. It provides a major resource for research in African American arts and letters of the 20th century.) They yearly had a wonderful publication.

I want to add here, that one of the Asian women artists said to me that what she found so annoying about the feminist movement was the implication that from a white woman’s perspective: “We are white and we are in charge.” And so some of the women of color referred to it as the “Imperial Feminist Movement”, and I remember, because I was trying to nudge them into dealing with issues of race that they would say: “Oh this is just about politics.” And I remember at one point someone came to me and said: “Please be cooperative.”, meaning, don’t bring it up. I also found, and I don’t know if this came from Douglas Crimp or, I can’t remember the name of the other person but they decided that I was like Jesse Helms and censoring. Jesse Helms was a white senator.

SUSAN: He was a segregationist. 

HOWARDENA: 

Yes. He shut down the funds from the National Endowment of the Arts going to visual artists in 1991. Artists are still unable to get funding. The cause he stated was “objectionable material.” So as I said earlier visual artists are still not able to get grants from the NEA. I think creative writing and translators of literature from another language into English still get grants. The only way an artist can get an NEA grant is indirectly through an organization. I checked on line and if a museum were to apply for an NEA grant to do a show of an artist’s work, that meant that you had to be well known in order for them to pay attention to you in that way. And another thing I wanted to bring up about the NEA; I was invited by the NEA when I was working at the Modern to be on a jury for a commission in the Virgin Islands. I suggested two artists, Mel Edwards, who is an African American sculptor and I can’t even remember who the other was, a white artist, also a sculptor, who ended up getting the commission. And when I brought up Mel Edwards’s name, the person who was in charge from the NEA said to us, the jury: “No, no, no. We’ll have none of that.” He did not want for me to suggest an African American artist, so he took him out of the pool of white artists who had been suggested by other panelists.

CHRYSANNE:

Zarina, Ana Mendieta, and Kazuko Miyamoto, curated Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States at A.I.R. where you exhibited Free, White and 21. Can you speak about the importance of that exhibition and your friendship with Ana Mendieta, whose influence continues to grow so many years after her tragic death?

HOWARDENA:

Yes. Ana and I were friends. I met her when I had a gallery day at the Modern and I went to her studio. I remember she just sat down and fed me beans and rice and it was so delicious. Anyway, we became friends. It was interesting, because while she was still alive, the white female critics were very harsh in their criticism of her work and then after she died they reversed—they started praising her. I thought that was weird. But Ana, she stepped forward and curated this show that was integrated. It was the first time that I got to show Free, White and 21, literally the first time. After the tape was made, after I did it, I remember the assistant at Downtown Community TV told me, when it was submitted to a jury situation, they said they didn’t like the tape because it was too divisive. So I got some blowback there. And then after A.I.R. showed it, Ana showed it, it was shown—Franklin Furnace stepped in to show it in their space. I was at that point unable to attend. They charged admission and I said don’t charge admission for a twelve minute tape, just don’t give me my honorarium and let people in for free. And people were very shocked by the tape. That was the feedback that I got. They were really shocked.  

SUSAN: 

Well, I have to say, even though white people are much more aware of the regularity of these kinds of incidents than in 1980, I still find the video shocking now.

I was curious about whether there was a sense of community early in your career among other African American women working at the time or if you were all largely isolated from one another? Lorraine O’Grady, Faith Ringgold, Adrian Piper and Carrie Mae Weems come to mind as African American artists I was aware of early in my career. I also imagine that A.I.R. was a supportive community as it was one you were instrumental in creating? At least at first. I know you later left.

HOWARDENA:

I didn’t feel a sense of community because many of the white women artists at A.I.R. were married and they didn’t need to have a day job. I had a different kind of attitude about work since I worked during the day and did my studio work at night. They, I think, in the back of their minds, expected me to bring the Modern in to see their work. I didn’t find, necessarily, any kind of support and there was one women who was one of the founding members with me, who for years, and who knows, she still might be saying it, but if my name came up, and that would be within the A.I.R. community—I found this out because I had an acquaintance who heard her say this at meetings—this person would say, when my name came up that I didn’t know I was black. And so I would get these swipes, maybe because I was successful, maybe because I am well educated. I don’t know what it was that made her so angry. Anyway, I ran into some hostility there. I was the one to name the gallery, which is ironic. 

CHRYSANNE: 

Did both you and Ana experience hostility there toward your work?

HOWARDENA:

Well, I experienced hostility there toward me as a person, but not necessarily toward me as an artist. That’s when I started doing the memory pieces. About Ana, I am not sure. She and Nancy Spero were very good friends. And she never said anything to me against A.I.R. ever. But also, we had a different kind of life style after my leaving the Modern so, I don’t know how to explain it. I think we were friends at a distance after a while because she won a Prix de Rome and she was away and then—this is very weird. I don’t even know if I should talk about it. My head injury made me really sensitive and Ana would always take me out for my birthday every year. So she and Carl took me out for my birthday. I was sitting there at the table in the restaurant. I think it was called 5th Avenue near 8th Street and this thought flashed across my mind—literally: “He is going to kill her with his hands.” And I remember thinking: “OMG, what do I do with this?” That was a bit of a shock. Then I went to a meeting for the Social Security building commissions, a project that was hiring African American artists to do commissions for the lobby—it was a huge lobby. We had our first meeting and that’s when I found out, because Mel Edwards and his wife were supposed to meet Ana for dinner and she didn’t show up and they found out what happened to her. And that’s how I found out that she was dead. Her sister, apparently, I did go to the trial for her part of the time, but her sister said that night Ana had asked for a divorce and she was also very afraid of windows.

SUSAN:  

I read the book, Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta by Robert Katz, which was published in 1990, five years after her death, and I have to say that he was very shrewd in his decision to forgo a jury trial and stand trial before a lone judge.

HOWARDENA: 

And that was the judge too. That judge used to go to art world parties. And rich, influential galleries paid for Andre’s “ hot shot” lawyer.

SUSAN: 

My recollection is that that judge refused to go to see the interior of that apartment. I am pretty sure that’s true, so as a consequence he would not have seen that the window ledge was very high, above her waist level because she was so tiny, and that it would have been hard to just fall out. Not to mention that he confessed during the 911 call. In any case, the judge was obviously predisposed toward Andre somehow.

HOWARDENA:

Yes.

CHRYSANNE:

You have traveled extensively.  You have mentioned that your travels helped you: “not get isolated in the American pathology”. How did your trips to India and Africa effect you? The textiles of Africa and India are vastly different than what is seen here. How did their details, colors and shapes resonate with you? Were they a source of connection for your creative practice? Did you actually make work while traveling in these places?

HOWARDENA:

I didn’t make work. I made work afterwards. I lived in Japan for seven months and that was on an NEA grant, the U.S. Japan Friendship Commission Creative Artists’ Fellowship/Artists Exchange Program 1981-1982. I lived there for 7 months. It was difficult. They are not happy with women, foreigners, and people of color or the handicapped. They are very mean to the Korean people who live there. Whites who tried to live there would come up to me and say: “Now I know what it is like to be Black!”

I have travelled to Africa three times, including Egypt. I went to South Africa when Mandela was President and visited his cell on Robin Island near Cape Town, South Africa. Then I traveled with Lowery Sims, while I was working for the Museum. We spent about a month and a half in East and West Africa. It was a tough trip because of the way women were treated. It was just unbelievable. I remember in Nigeria, at least that’s what we ran into, there was a lone African American woman art historian who married someone from a high caste in Nigeria. She moved there and she was told that a woman must keep her eyes looking down and she shouldn’t say a word. I don’t know how she stood it. Eventually she escaped. She left. But I had that impression, frankly, in a number of the countries I have visited and found it disturbing and frightening. In India, I had friends who live there. I have been there three or four times and spent about four months there. I lived in the desert. In terms of influencing my work, I would say, I was influenced by African and Indian textiles; free-flowing cloth. I don’t stretch my canvases or usually don’t. In Egypt it was just wonderful to see the ancient culture. It was quite amazing, though. I went there in 1974. It was years ago and was during the Egypt-Israeli war, so very few people were there as tourists. We got to see a little bit more, partly because we were taking trains and buses. We got to see things we would never have seen like the temple at Edfu. 

I would say that the asymmetry of Japanese work and their use of color, especially Kabuki theatre costumes influenced my work and their use of color fabrics. 

CHRYSANNE: 

Did you enjoy India?

HOWARDENA: 

Sometimes. It was too hot for me. When I was in the desert, it was 123 degrees. I brought a thermometer. I was staying on an ashram and I later found out the guy was a paedophile. There was a well known artist, actually from California, who died there, a woman. She was in a building doing some art work and it collapsed on her. I wish I could remember her name. Anyway, I think it’s important that people travel. Right now, I am just too old and I’ve seen a lot and you can do virtual travel, you can do a lot if you have a smart phone. You can find out a lot of stuff just googling. Feeling it with your skin is another story. I also lived in Scandinavia (Sweden) part of one summer (1964) when I was in college. The program was called The Experiment in International Living out of Vermont. In general the Swedes treated me like a queen. I didn’t see any brown people there at that point, but then when we were traveling as a group, we went to a hotel and they refused to give me a room. They put up a bed in the ballroom for me. Yes, so I remember that I slept in the ballroom and no one was around.

The daughter of Swedish family I lived with and another young Swedish woman, whose family took in one of my group, and I were walking in the countryside, and two German guys had two Doberman Pinschers and they set them on us and called them off after they started leaping for my throat. The reason I say my throat is because the instant reflex of the two Swedish young women was to push me out in front of them so that I would be the one who would be bitten. Fortunately the dogs obeyed their owners’ call to stop and I was not bitten. In hindsight, I think that was their racism to push me forward. I would be the one sacrificed. If you look at movies, often it is the person of color who gets killed. To this day I am not comfortable around Dobermans or large dogs in general. There is also the fact that during the civil rights demonstrations in Alabama in the 60s, large dogs were set on adults and young people. I would also like to note that the vilified group in Sweden were the Gypsies. You could be in a store and if people who were Gypsies showed up, everyone would scatter. For some reason I remember hearing: “The Gypsies are here, the Gypsies are here.”

SUSAN:

This next question circles back to the issue of race because I have been listening to a twelve-part podcast hosted by John Biewen, a white journalist from the Midwest, who collaborates with Chenjerai Kumanyika, an African American scholar who teaches at Rutgers. The podcast is called Seeing White and attempts to “unpack” the construction of whiteness and by implication race, in America. I often find myself wondering what this conversation would sound like between a white woman and an African American woman who are both feminists. This brings me to your video Free, White and 21. The video, made in 1980, reads as critique of the way white middle class feminists treated black women. It is clear in the beautifully articulated book by Claudia Rankine titled Citizen, published in 2014, that many of the kinds of egregious behaviors you experienced then and that your mother experienced before you are still endemic to the experiences of black women in America. It is part of the sad power of this video that it feels as pertinent today as it did forty years ago, as if it had been made yesterday. I wonder if you still feel its aim to be primarily the white feminist movement. It seems to be something all whites need to own? Does it feel as if white women in the feminist movement have gained a better understanding of the positions of black women? Has that dialogue shifted in any meaningful ways that you can see?

HOWARDENA:

Okay. That’s a long one. I have been inside this apartment for three months with a few trips out for blood work, I have not participated physically in any of the protests. I am seventy-seven, and I use a walker, and I am scared I am going to get the virus, but my heart is out there. I have a new film/video, ROPE/FIRE/WATER, 2019 coming out at the SHED, which will deal with lynching, the Children’s March and at the end, because we made the video before George Floyd was murdered and Black Lives Matter became more well known, we are adding a list of names, a long list of names. For example, in 2015, a hundred and some blacks were killed by the police, but in 2019 under Trump the number goes up to one thousand ninety-eight. This is something I figured out to do yesterday, something I wish I had put in the tape. And the mention of some of the names will bring in what I feel is happening now.

Note that Trump supporters are currently painting over in black paint the large yellow texts which read “BLACK LIVES MATTER”. The text is painted on streets in various parts of the country. Trump referred to the text as “hate speech.”

I wanted to mention being at an upscale wedding in the late 1960s. This was after I graduated from Yale, and one of my close friends, a student, wanted me to be one of her bridesmaids. Her wedding was in Kennebunkport, Maine. I had just had my hair cut into an Afro and of course they were really upset about that. I remember one of the white women guests said to me: “Now you can tell me, what do really do at the Modern.” So I ran into that. I was being insulted in a “gilded cage.”

I think with the murder of George Floyd the dialogue has changed. I can’t say that the woman at the wedding has changed. She might even not be still alive, but I think the dialogue has changed and I am amazed at how diverse the protests are. I don’t know how long this change will last, I am kind of afraid to speculate.

I was introduced to white feminism by the art critic Lucy Lippard. I met her while I was working at the Modern. I was assigned to help her as she put together a traveling show about Max Ernst. Cynthia Navaretta, who passed away last week at 97 was also a mentor and my publisher. She published the Women Artists Newsletter. Her press was called Midmarch Arts Press. She published some of my books and she also published a major compendium of Black women artists called Gumbo Ya Ya. There were some individual white women who were very, supportive and very helpful. I think the problem now is that systemic racism is still full steam ahead. On top of that, there are other serious things, so many things at once. We have the resident of the White House, who is a narcissist and worse, and we have this terrible, genocidal virus, and the people going to the protests are running the risk of getting it and there are so many other catastrophes at once: there are climate change, forest fires and floods, bad storms. This is a really difficult time.

My fear is that if the resident of the White House wins by cheating, purging the voters, having too few polling places and malfunctioning machines, foreign help—you name it—we are screwed. We are lost. Because he is changing the face of the federal court system and turning it over to right wing bigots and even if he loses, will he leave? Because I think his strategy will be to push it up to the Supreme Court, so that the court will give him the Presidency, because he has these two people he appointed, although he lost on the DACA bill and on the LGBTQ case. There are so many bad things happening at once. I am just hoping that the level of courage that young people have now, the fact that both whites and Blacks can work together, is very encouraging. But I also want to add, we must include in the dialogue the voices of First Nations people and artists. Trump has pulled away the virus testing from the Navajo Nation and so Doctors Without Borders has gone to the Navajo Nation to help. They have issues with not having fresh water, a shortage of food, it’s just awful and I am so afraid if he wins we are totally ruined as a country. Even some of the Republicans are backing Biden, namely the Lincoln Project.

CHRYSANNE:   

Your Autobiography Paintings fascinate me, both for their presence and beauty and for the references in their titles. Can you speak more about how you used your and your mother’s post card collection not only to help your memory recovery but to create the works? A recent article in the New York Times had a photograph of you next to a painting titled Autobiography: Artemis, 1986. I am curious regarding your selection of Artemis for the title and if there is a special meaning behind it. I started rereading a book I have had in my library for over 20 years, which has been inspirational to me for many reasons. It is The Cult of The Black Virgin by Ean Begg. There is a section on Artemis and Cybele. There have been speculations that some of the Greek mythic goddesses were black, and that some of the statues of Black Madonnas in Europe came from Northern Africa. When I saw the painting, I was curious if there is a connection?

HOWARDENA:

Well, to tell you the truth, no. I knew about the Black Madonna but I hadn’t done any research on her. I liked the name Artemis, and the kind of odd shape and distorted Greek statue in the painting (I distorted it, not out of malice). The use of postcards really started in the mid 1970s, before I had the head injury. I made some interesting post card pieces and just gave them away. When I traveled, to jog my memory, because it needed to be jogged after the accident, I would collect postcards from different places and the most beautiful were the Japanese cards. Their printing and publishing is excellent—they do a superior job. Anyway I was conscious of the Black Madonna but I was not, shall we say, actively researching her. (I have Greek DNA but I’ve only touched down once in an airplane in Greece.)

CHRYSANNE:

Your paintings, Separate But Equal Genocide: AIDS, 1991–92, have a deep resonance for me; seeing two works with black and white flag imagery. Now that we are in another pandemic, which disproportionately effects the Black and Hispanic communities and the elderly, how do you feel this work reads today?  

HOWARDENA:

Well, the people who I know who are gay love that painting. My cousin was gay and he died of AIDS when he was 35. I almost feel I should do another set of flags for Covid. The point I was making with the Genocide: AIDS painting—my cousin looked white. When people thought he was Latino, or something other than white, he would get one kind of medical treatment and when they thought he was white he would get another kind. So that is why I made the two flags, and then the names on the flags were the names you never hear about, the names of children and teenagers, who had died of AIDS. So that was the reason why I made the two flags. But Covid is different because it affects men and women, gay, straight and trans gender, it affects all of us, so I have to think about that—how I would want to express it, because that requires many flags, not just two flags. 

SUSAN:

The reception of work is often different in Europe than in the U.S. You state in an interview with Kellie Jones in 2011 that the Video Drawings were read “as political statements about the U.S”. I presume this to mean that Europeans saw them as a critique of the U.S? Was this in response to the more overtly political content of the Video Drawings of the 80s or of the drawings in general? How did they articulate what they understood your critique to be?

HOWARDENA:

I wonder if I want to answer that. I don’t know how to answer that. I mean one of the reasons, in Europe, it was like an artefact, the art was seen as an artefact, so things to me like the image of a white man with the weather report, is just a white man with the weather report, but to them it meant something different. I did have a show of the Video Drawings at the Sonja Henie Onstad Foundation in Oslo, Norway and they were included in an exhibition that travelled to Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Germany. I don’t remember getting that much feedback about it. You know, I don’t know how to answer that question, because anything that we see that comes in from Europe, sometimes it is so fused with American culture in some ways, that we can’t tell the difference. My favorite part of the series, and one that could easily be seen by Europeans as very “American”, are about war atrocities. It’s called the War Series and I have images that I took from television of everything from hunger to napalm to agent orange. It is really a kind of gruesome series. Of all of my attempts to work with the television, those were the most powerful of the series. But again, I think the Video Drawings in general were seen as an artefact of American life and culture prior to 2000. I don’t know what I would do with it now. I would not want to do anything relating to the resident in the White House. I don’t even want to see his face in the video drawings. I am starting to try to write my memoir and writing during this time. It will have a lot of history behind it. I am kind of unnerved. I really don’t want to get the virus. The virus is now part of the world’s history. What will happen to people in poor countries. Someone stated recently in the media that social distancing and access to masks is a privilege.

I do have an excellent ex-TA who is going to help me. I have received permission to teach online this coming semester, so I do not have to go to campus and be exposed to the virus. Apparently the virus has mutated and is more infectious, but does not make you sicker. I think I heard that on CNN or MSNBC. There was a woman on CNN or MSNBC who was 102 who had survived the influenza epidemic, 2 bouts of cancer and Covid and is still alive and walking, with a walker, but seems to have her mind as well.

SUSAN:

I wanted to return to the New York Times article where you are seated in front of the Artemis painting. The article was about a lawsuit against a previous dealer you had and one who happened to be African American. It takes tremendous courage in the art world for an artist to sue a dealer. While dealers often take advantage of artists, there is genuine fear of retaliation, so most artists take the hit and move on. How did you come to your decision? Has there been negative blowback about this? If so, from whom? I don’t mean name names but other dealers, institutions, collectors, other artists? 

HOWARDENA:

Well, I would say that I have gotten 99.9% support, because there are so many artists whom he has hurt. He would represent us and then he wouldn’t pay. I got one call from a young African American dealer/art consultant. She was afraid that this shines a negative light on Black dealers, but this guy has been a crook for years. I have an excellent lawyer and my dealer is behind me. I don’t know what is going to happen. 

SUSAN: 

It’s impressive that your current dealer is backing you.

HOWARDENA:

Yes, it makes a big difference.

CHRYSANNE:

Does this dealer that you are suing still have work of yours?

HOWARDENA:

Yes. He still has work of mine and he has sold work of mine, and I found out about it, but he never paid me. This has also happened to other artists in the gallery. What really makes me mad is that he is stealing from the artists’ widows. He knows that they need the money to live on, but does not seem to care.

SUSAN:

Given the tremendous ground swell of protest all over the country against the racist violence against Black people, do you feel there is a real shift happening this time, and does that make you optimistic about the possibility of real social justice and also, with respect to the art world, greater inclusion of Black curators in institutions, which are predominantly white, and Black artists gaining more visibility?

HOWARDENA:

Well, I think it’s creaking along and I think that Covid really put a wrench in it. The Modern’s Chief Curator, Ann Temkin is really doing her best to integrate the collection, and not just the collection that is hiding in storage. So I am very thrilled that she is doing that. I don’t know what is happening, I mean one of the museums that has been the most impenetrable is the Guggenheim. I don’t know. You see, I am speaking out about my own colleagues, African American artists, but I am interested in First Nations artists, in Latino and Asian artists. I want to see everybody have a chance and not just my particular group. Because even in the research that I did, I did cover different groups in terms of the percentage of work you would find in shows, years ago, and it’s sad. I had an experience maybe four or five years ago, where a young woman came to me, she was almost in tears, African American, very beautiful young woman, working for one of the art organizations and the white women were harassing her constantly and she finally gave up and quit, which is what they wanted. I wish I knew which organization it was. According to an acquaintance she was weeping. She was really upset. So in terms of the ranks of the white cultural institutions, they are, still some of them, a closed door.

I am on the Board of Governors of Skowhegan. They have diversified to some extent their governors. When it comes to museum staff, like the two African American curators who curated my show, Naomi Beckwith and Valerie Cassel Oliver, and they are both major curators, one at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the other at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Ashely James a new African American curator at the Guggenheim, you see some attempts by some museums to change. But we still have a long way to go. The art world does not seem to mind diversity from European countries, or white artists from non-white countries like South Africa or colonized countries like Australia. One thing I found helpful was to have a deep DNA done. National Geographic has a genome project. It costs $119. But the concern is now about privacy and what do they do with your DNA. When I did that research a number of years ago, I could only follow my mother’s DNA, because they have to get the father’s DNA from the son, brother, etc. But they traced back 80,000 years to my mother’s DNA in Africa and then from another company in Canada, I found out I had ancestors who were Zulu, from Cape Town, South Africa, Bantu, Basque, Thracian, Scythian, Greek, Ethiopian, Sicilian, Indian (New Delhi), Madagascan, Libyan, Scandinavian, Inuit, Finnish, Irish, Portuguese, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Palestinian and more. I am looking forward to all artists of all backgrounds, ethnicities and sexual orientations being given a seat at the table. We can learn from one another. The dialogue, which is forming now as the result of many tragedies, will help make a solid positive change for the better. Do not be discouraged. VOTE!