The event honors Professor Howardena Pindell in her final year of teaching as she transitions to Toll Professor.
The Staller Center's Zuccaire Gallery announces Artists in Conversation: Howardena Pindell and Athena LaTocha, on Monday, March 20 at 4:30pm at Stony Brook University. Howardena Pindell is Distinguished Professor of Art at Stony Brook University, where she has taught for forty-three years. Athena LaTocha is an accomplished artist who received her MFA from Stony Brook in 2007. The event honors Professor Howardena Pindell in her final year of teaching as she transitions to Toll Professor.
With a Welcome by Stony Brook University President Maurie McInnis, the event is moderated by Associate Professor of Art History Soh Lee. Artists in Conversation is co-hosted by Stony Brook University's Art Department and Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery in connection with the Zuccaire Gallery's exhibition Revisiting 5+1, and supported by the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Humanities Institute of Stony Brook.
Monday, March 20 from 4:30pm-5:30pm, Staller Center for the Arts Recital Hall
Followed by a reception in the Staller Center's Zuccaire Gallery Lobby
Stony Brook University
FREE and open to the public
RSVP HERE : https://forms.gle/9ZrTK2knStRVKD169
Howardena Pindell
Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University. After graduating, she worked in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art for 12 years. In 1979, she began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook where she is now Distinguished Professor. Throughout her career, Pindell has exhibited extensively, including a major solo traveling exhibition, What Remains to Be Seen (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Brandeis University Museum, 2018-19) and a recent solo exhibition at The Shed, NYC (2020-21). The traveling exhibition Howardena Pindell: A New Language, which opened at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, UK), will travel in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Howardena Pindell was awarded the Archives of American Art Medal by the Smithsonian Institution, the Artist Legacy Foundation 2019 Award, and the College Art Association 2019 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement. Pindell's work is in the permanent collections of major museums internationally, including: the Brooklyn Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. https://www.howardenapindell.org/
Athena LaTocha
Athena LaTocha (b. Anchorage, Alaska) is an artist whose massive works on paper explore the relationship between human-made and natural worlds, in the wake of Earthworks artists from the 1960s and 1970s. The artist incorporates materials such as ink, lead, earth and wood, while looking at correlations between mark-marking and displacement of materials made by industrial equipment and natural events. Her works are informed by her upbringing in the wilderness of Alaska. LaTocha's process is about being immersed in these environments, while responding to the storied and, at times, traumatic cultural histories that are rooted in place. Her work has been shown across the country in places such as the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; CUE Art Foundation and Artists Space, New York City; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, South Dakota; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; and the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, Alaska. In 2021, her work was on view in Land Akin at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York and ID: Formations of the Self at Shirley Fiterman Art Center in New York City. Also in 2021, she had two solo exhibitions in the New York City area: Athena LaTocha: In the Wake of . . . on view at BRIC House in downtown Brooklyn; and Athena LaTocha: After the Falls at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit. Her work was additionally featured in Greater New York 2021, at MoMA P.S.1 in Long Island City. During 2022 and early 2023, she has had solo exhibitions at JDJ | The Ice House in Garrison, New York; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and at The Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Currently, LaTocha has work on view at JDJ Tribeca in New York City and The Green-Wood Cemetery. LaTocha is the recipient of artist grants and awards, among them the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Pocantico Art Prize in Visual Arts in 2022, Eiteljorg Fellowship, the National Academy Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Painting in 2021, Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2019 and 2016, Wave Hill in 2018, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2013. LaTocha received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Stony Brook University, New York.
https://athenalatocha.com/home.html
Revisiting 5+1: Revisiting 5+1 is a reflection on the historic 1969 Stony Brook University exhibition entitled 5+1. Revisiting 5+1 features work by the original six artists, all of whom were Black men, with an addition of six Black women artists, all trailblazers at a time when their work in abstraction was challenged by both the mainstream art world and Black art institutions. Photographs and archival materials exhibited alongside the work provide additional contextual history from this era of student protests and racial justice on campus.
Videos