- Title
- Free, White and 21
- Date Made
- 1980
- Medium
- Single-channel video, color, with sound, open edition
- Dimensions
- Duration: 12 minutes, 15 seconds
- Accession Number
- M.2023.252
- Collecting Area
- Modern Art
- Curatorial Notes
In 1979, Howardena Pindell was in a serious car accident and as a result decided to make her work—in her words—“more viscerally personal, reflecting the impact of my direct experience. . . . The summer following the accident, I created Free, White and 21.” Frustrated by the racism and elitism she saw in the women’s movement (as well as the art and museum world), Pindell vented in what she describes as a “vicious” and “political” video: “[W]ith the [video]tape I am trying to express my own experience and why I have certain reactions. . . . I was bristling at the women’s movement as well as the art world and some of the usual offensive encounters that were heaped on top of the racism of my profession.”
Free, White and 21 looks at white feminists’ hypocritical blindness to racial oppression, with Pindell (the sole performer in the video) playing various roles. As “the Artist,” she recounts experiences attesting to anti-Black racism; as “the White Woman,” she appears as a 1960s suburbanite in a blonde wig and whiteface, denying these experiences with responses such as, “Well, that’s never happened to me. After all, I’m free, white, and 21. You really must be paranoid.” Based on personal experiences from childhood on, the video is titled after a catchphrase used to establish white privilege in the United States, popularized by young white women as early as the 1930s.
Carol Eliel