One of the most defining motifs in Pindell’s work is the circle, appearing in myriad variations – ellipses, perforations, spray-painted dots and hole punches. Her use of this cosmic form is rooted in a childhood memory of the Jim Crow laws of enforced racial segregation in the United States. In 1951, when she was eight years old, during a family trip to northern Kentucky, her father stopped at a roadside root beer stand. Pindell recalls noticing red circles at the bottom of their cups, later learning that they were used to identify the utensils designated for Black customers. In the 1970s – while working at MoMA’s Department of Prints and Drawings where she was the institution’s first Black curator – she sought to reclaim the circle by the pioneering use of a humble piece of office stationery to create works of art: the hole punch. She employed this tool to perforate cardstock, Manila folders and other materials, creating templates through which she would spray acrylic paint onto unstretched canvas to create diffuse constellations of atomised dots. This innovation ushered a further development in her practice, in which she used the hole-punched refuse as the primary medium, affixing and layering the tiny discs onto canvases which were cut and sewn back together in gridded formation – counterbalancing the inherent order of the planar grid with the densely accrued confetti-like dots. Pindell regards the use of circles in her art as a therapeutic act: ‘I found that just transforming the circle into something positive was a task that seems ongoing.’(1)

A reciprocal relationship between Pindell’s spray paintings and her works using hole-punched chads can be gleaned – each technique fortifies the other’s exploration of surface and depth, whether by the illusory nature of her canvases or the tactile dimensionality of piled paper. Originating from her 12 years of handling paper as a curator at MoMA and a lifelong fascination with the layering of textiles in African indigenous costume, Pindell’s attraction to palimpsestic dimensionality is also informed by to her experiences in Asia. During a brief sojourn in Japan from 1981 to 1982, Pindell encountered the sumptuously illustrated 12th-century prayer scroll known as the Heike Nōkyō, housed in the Itsukushima Shrine near Hiroshima. In a 2021 interview, Pindell explained that the scroll’s layered media, used to create pictorial depth, continues to influence her approach to creating levelled worlds.(2) The examples of Pindell’s cut-and-sewn, chadded canvases featured in this exhibition embody the fascination with physical science that motivates much of her recent work. Untitled #31 (The Solar System Is Beige), for example, playfully reinvents the cosmic order as gridded and monochrome, while City Lights…Night Flight is freer in form, the stitching looser and zigzagged, suggesting charts of the star-studded sky.

Pindell’s ‘Tesseract’ series – named after the four-dimensional hypercube – exhibits her virtuosic proficiency in building the illusion of depth, with circles, diamonds, cones, cylinders and other shapes orbiting or radiating from a central light source within an aeriform haze. Here, the influence of Japan is also evident in the primacy of colour and use of balletic asymmetries. Affirming the foundational primacy of the circle in Pindell’s creativity, Tesseract #17, Tesseract #19 (Deep Space) and Tesseract #23 take as their focal point a backlit disc with concentric energy fields multiplying outwards; in Tesseract #18, this circle seems to have morphed into a bulbous marine creature, while Tesseract #20 revolves around a sunlike nucleus – or a supernova – of pink and yellow light.

The exhibition debuts Pindell’s ‘Deep Sea’ series, which she also refers to as ‘Deep Space’, furthering her inquiry into elusive phenomena that acquire form and meaning through scientific knowledge. Like the circle motif, this interest is rooted in her childhood: ‘My father was a mathematician, and he was interested, of course, in science. And so instead of a doll, I was given a microscope for Christmas, and I was enamoured by what I would see. I had the slides, and I put some drinking water from Philadelphia on the slide, and you won't believe what was swimming around in the drinking water’; a visual recollection bringing to mind Pindell’s bokeh effect compositions.(3) In Deep Sea #8, the base colour dilates and contracts between a dark, off-black blue and something closer to twilight, while yellow phosphorescence sparkles on the surface, conjuring churning galaxies as well as the bioluminescent lamps of deep-sea organisms. Switching from a horizontal to a vertical format, Deep Sea #3 is grounded with burnt sienna, establishing a terrestrial cosmos. Though initially the surface appears uniform, prolonged viewing reveals a burst of light – formed of sky blue and umbrous orange particles of paint – fanning from above, intercut lengthways by faint plough lines that rhyme with the stitches in her cut and sewn work.

Rendered through stipples of light and colour, Pindell’s abstractions evoke vast and infinitesimal spectrums of existence, summoning equally visions of primordial creation and the Big Bang. Such cosmogenic effects may also possess a spiritual dimension. Reflecting on her travels across the globe in her 1989 autobiography, she noted, ‘The unifying factor I found in each spiritual tradition, Western and non-Western [...] was a concern for the visual expression of the “divine” through beauty’.

(1) Howardena Pindell in conversation with Toby Kamps, The Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2019.
(2) Howardena Pindell in conversation with Fiona Bradley, Fruitmarket, 30 November 2021, watch here.
(3) Howardena Pindell in conversation with ArtDrunk, 4 October 2024.