Untitled #30

Howardena Pindell developed a singular idiom in the 1960s, hole-punching drawings and assembling the resulting dots into textured, evocative works that vacillate between painting and relief sculpture. Pindell sees her collages as typifying a “black aesthetic,” characterized, in her words, by a “very rich surface that empowers.” Her collages are receptive, harboring all manner of artistic and quotidian materials, from gouache, tempera, and acrylic to thread, cat hair, and glitter. Both meticulously composed and riotous, the hole-punched works walk the line between order and chaos.

Though Pindell’s work delights in pure abstraction, the sources of her inspiration are as everyday in nature as her materials. In a recent interview, Pindell mused that her embrace of color, which suffuses the hole-punched works, might have been inspired by her color television. Her fascination with the dot, meanwhile, might derive in part from an experience she had in the 1950s, as she and her father drove through Kentucky: They stopped at a root beer stand where every mug bore a red circle on the bottom. As she recalled, “I asked my father, ‘What is this red circle?’ He said, ‘That’s because we’re black and we cannot use the same utensils as the whites.’ I realized that’s really the origin of my being driven to try to change the circle in my mind, trying to take the sting out of that.”