2018.7
Video Drawings: Tennis
Artist
Howardena Pindell
(Philadelphia, PA, 4/14/1943 - )
Title
Video Drawings: Tennis
Creation Date
1975
Century
mid-20th century
Dimensions
8 x 10 in. (20.32 x 25.4 cm)
Classification
Photographs
Creation Place
North America, United States
Medium and Support
chromogenic print on paper
Credit Line
Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
2018.7
Artist Howardena Pindell began experimenting with video technologies, turning to television and acetate in her studio. This experimentation also marked a transition in her practice, moving from abstraction to more personal and political works. Video Drawings, a series she returned to over two decades, showcased television programming ranging from sports to political speeches. Pindell superimposed drawn vectors, numbers, and dots on these TV scenes, photographing them at slow speeds to blur the video image. The presence of small ink circles in this work suggests the motion of the tennis ball, but also appropriates the dots she recalls encountering as a child in Southern restaurants on plates reserved for Black customers. The subject of tennis was hardly a neutral choice, representing at the time a physical and symbolic site where gender norms and racial stereotypes were contested by tennis stars like Althea Gibson, Billie Jean King, and Arthur Ashe.