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Behind the breath-taking color and beauty of Howardena Pindell’s art lies a lifetime of struggle, survival and stirring triumph. Though not readily perceived by the average eye, themes of identity, human rights, politics and society are embedded throughout her work, revealing what Pindell calls “hidden histories,” or “the unpleasant realities of contemporary American existence that we all prefer to ignore.”

From the beginning, her life was shadowed and influenced by the injustices and politics of the 20th Century: the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Korean War, the Civil Rights movement, the U.S. invasion of Cuba, John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Vietnam.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Pindell experienced the cruel reality of being black in a world of prejudice. Her use of thousands of punched dots alludes to a time when Pindell and her father took a trip to visit her grandmother. They pulled over to get something to drink, and Pindell noticed a bright red dot stuck to the bottom of her root beer glass.

“I asked my father about it,” she says. “He told me they used the dots to mark the glassware that had been used by blacks. That image of that red dot has stuck with me.”

Several of her pieces include the dots. She began with a dimestore hole-punch, and now gets her hole punches custom made. And the dots are getting bigger.

Pindell finished high school in Philadelphia and enrolled in Boston University to study painting, graduating in 1965.

She earned a master of fine arts from Yale in 1967 then applied on a whim to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was hired as an exhibition assistant to help circulate artwork abroad. During 12 years with MoMA she traveled to Africa, Egypt, France, India, Brazil and Japan. She learned social injustice was global.

On a trip to Africa, extremists commandeered her plane, taking the passengers and diplomats aboard to Uganda. She also traveled to Egypt, naively unaware of the Arab/Israeli war waging. In the late 1970s she traveled to Brazil, which was under a military dictatorship at the time. Armed guards were everywhere, marring her trip to Rio.

Pindell’s art began to depict her experiences and her thoughts and feelings. Although never “in your face,” the themes she tackles lie just beneath the surface.

“You really have to look closely,” said Elizabeth Chubbuck Weinstein, art curator at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum. “The political statements that she is making aren’t abrasive. They’re not going to knock you down, visually. The great thing about her work is that it is so beautiful anyone can appreciate it and really respect the process. You don’t have to delve into these underlying meanings if you don’t want to.”

She joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1979, and an auto accident there left her with severe head trauma and memory loss.

“A hit like that is such a shock to your head,” she says. “I could not read a watch or a newspaper for the longest time, and I still have problems with faces and names.”

Pindell became immersed in her craft more than ever, using her art to help piece together the holes in her tattered memory. Her work morphed from the figurative to more abstract. She began cutting up photographs and postcards from her travels, manipulating them, using them as vehicles to piece together who she was and where she had been. Her use of color became more vibrant and her once-minimalist works gave way to 3-D wonders. Eventually, piece-by-piece, her memory returned, though not entirely.

Today her work is internationally revered and part of some significant collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. A recent show in New York closed this summer to rave reviews, including one from Holland Cotter of the New York Times, considered the preeminent U.S. art critic.

An exhibition of 50 pieces spanning 36 years is now on display at LASM, and hangs through April 7.