Howardena Pindell, painter and writer, will present a lecture titled "A Life's Journey" Thursday, Sept. 24, at 4 p.m. in 101 W. Sibley Hall on the Cornell University campus.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

Pindell, a professor of art at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a visiting professor of art at Yale University, is a graduate of the Yale MFA program. She has been working since 1980 on "Autobiography," a series of paintings and installations that explore her experiences as an African-American woman, teacher, world traveler and political activist. She has lived and worked for extended periods in Japan and India and has visited Africa, most recently returning from giving a paper at the second annual Johannesburg Biennial.

Her lecture will include slides of her work from college to the present. She will discuss the growth of her work and put it in perspective relative to world events.

Her paintings and installations are formal explorations of such diverse materials as acrylics, dyes, glitter, handcolored papers and sewing threads. "They also resonate with allusions to Yoruba and Japanese sculpture and images. Furthermore, my work is infused with issues of race and gender and has accompanying written narratives," says Pindell.

In addition to being in numerous museums and corporate collections, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Pindell has published on racism, sexism, AIDS and genocide. Her writings have appeared in Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, Print Collector Newsletter, Third Text and Paradoxa, a feminist web site magazine. She is also the author of Heart of the Question: The Writings and Paintings of Howardena Pindell (1997). Her 1980 film, "Free, White and 21," explores her experiences of racism in educational, employment and social settings.

She has received two grants from the National Endowment of the Arts for painting, a Guggenheim fellowship, a 1990 College Art Association Award for the most distinguished body of work or performance and the Studio Museum in Harlem Artist Award.

The lecture is sponsored by the Committee on University Lectures.