Autobiography: Water (Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts) 1988

This is Howardena Pindell's "Autobiography: Water" – a sea of blue stitched into place. I see her working on this, obsessively, in a kind of trance, building up the surface into something densely layered. I imagine Pindell was thinking about memory, maybe ancestral memory, as she made this. There are little fragments of faces, and even tiny boats bobbing around in this blue world. It’s like she’s conjuring up a collective history, one where water is both a source of life and a site of trauma. The stitching is so physical, so repetitive. Each stitch feels like a mark of remembrance, holding these disparate elements together in a single, unified space. You know, it reminds me a bit of some of the quilting I’ve seen, where personal and collective narratives are stitched into the very fabric of the work. It makes you think about how artists are always in conversation with each other, even across time, borrowing ideas, and pushing against conventions. We try to find new ways to express the inexpressible. Pindell certainly does that. The image feels ambiguous, open-ended, like a question mark hanging in the air.