Produced between 1969 and 1972, Untitled is a richly chromatic canvas comprised of innumerable densely layered dots, created by the American artist Howardena Pindell in the formative years of her career. Completed in New York City, amid the ferment of rising social liberation movements and an increasingly experimental art scene, Untitled marks Pindell’s initial strides into abstraction and the formation of an aesthetic language that resisted the contemporary discourses surrounding race and gender. Untitled is emblematic of Pindell’s early experiments, in which she leveraged an unconventional technique to create immersive veils of constellated colour – an approach that continues to inform her artistic practice to this day.

Pindell began her artistic career as a skilled figurative painter, graduating from Yale University’s prestigious MFA programme in 1967 as the only African American woman in a predominately male cohort. Relocating to New York that same year, Pindell took up a position as an Exhibitions Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), later advancing to the role of Associate Curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, where she became the first Black woman to hold a curatorial position in the institution’s history. Alongside her new role, Pindell remained dedicated to producing art. Working predominately in the evenings and often deprived of the natural light required for figurative painting, her output in the late 1960s became increasingly abstract and experimental. Finding inspiration in the everyday office materials available to her at MoMA, Pindell developed an innovative spray-painting technique: crafting stencils by repeatedly perforating manila folders and cardstock with a hole punch, then spraying diluted acrylic paint through the templates to create layered constellations of colour across the canvas. Untitled is one of approximately 20 canvases Pindell created in the late 1960s and early 1970s using this pioneering method, with other examples from this period housed in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins in France.

With the introduction of hole-punched stencils, Pindell established the primacy of the circle within her creative practice. This recurrent motif, which has since manifested in myriad forms throughout her work, finds its origins in a profound childhood memory from the 1950s. During a family visit to Kentucky, then under the oppressive rule of Jim Crow laws, she encountered large red dots used to racially segregate utensils at a roadside root beer stand. Pindell’s invocation of the circle also speaks to her broader engagement with, and perception of, the visual world. Art historian Sarah Louise Cowan observes that, ‘for Pindell, the circle is primary – the basis of seeing (through round eyes), the shape that supports our bodies and lived environment (Earth), and the source of earthly light and energy (the sun) […] she deploys the form because in the context of her art, the circle could formally convey her idiosyncratic way of internally visualising the energetic forces and masses that comprise the universe’. (Sarah Louise Cowan, Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2022, p.43). Through layered matrices of colour and light, Untitled summons associations with both microcosmic realms and vast, celestial expanses.

Developed through aeriform layers of dispersed paint, Pindell’s atomised dots diffuse into one another, creating a sensuous and atmospheric field of modulated colour. Referencing the Pointillist techniques of Neo-Impressionist painters such as Georges Seurat, and the organic rhythmicity of Richard Pousette-Dart’s circular compositions, Untitled is similarly indebted to Josef Albers’s pioneering theories on colour, expounded by his protégé Sewell Sillman under whom Pindell studied at Yale. Alternating between red, orange, chartreuse, cerulean and violet, Pindell’s adept command of tonal contrasts in Untitled orchestrates an illusion of refracted light and movement, with darker shades appearing to recede into the background while lighter hues rise to the surface.

Distinguishing her work from the ‘pure’ abstraction of artists like Ad Reinhardt, whose nuanced treatment of colour and spatial dynamics parallel aspects of her own practice, Pindell’s painterly methods are intrinsically intertwined with her activism. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 signalled progress toward racial equality, the art world remained a deeply exclusionary space, posing challenges for Pindell as a Black woman, operating as both an abstract artist and as a curator. Rejecting the notion that abstraction and activism were mutually exclusive, Untitled was conceived alongside Pindell’s deepening involvement in social reform. Between 1969 and 1972, she joined the Byers Committee to investigate racial exclusion in acquisitions and exhibitions at MoMA, while also becoming a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery – the first women’s cooperative gallery in New York City. Anticipating the overtly political nature of her later works – such as the seminal video Free, White and 21 (1980), in which she delivers a deadpan confrontation of racism – Untitled asserts Pindell as an abstractionist with a growing resolve to transcend societal limitations. Assessing the laboriously crafted surfaces of Pindell’s abstractions, Naomi Beckwith, curator of Pindell’s first major retrospective exhibition held at MCA Chicago in 2018, suggests that even the act of creation can be interpreted as a form of resistance: ‘when you look at Pindell’s work […] you see the action of the artist. To see the action is to see the artist. Which means you have to think about a black woman’s body being activated.’ (Naomi Beckwith quoted in Elliot Reichert, ‘The Body As Work: An Interview with Naomi Beckwith on Howardena Pindell’, Newcity, 1 March 2018).

Untitled featured as the earliest example of Pindell’s large-scale abstractions in ‘Howardena Pindell: A New Language’ (2021–23), the artist’s first institutional show in the UK which toured from Fruitmarket, Edinburgh to Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Spike Island, Bristol. Tracing the creative diversity of Pindell’s career over five decades – from the incorporation of hole-punched ‘chads’ onto the surface of her paintings to her engagements with film – the exhibition highlighted the artist’s recent return to her iconic spray-painting techniques. Affirming the significance of Untitled in Pindell’s artistic maturation, this renewed embrace of her early methods brings to light the cyclical resonances that have immanently shaped and directed the trajectory of her career.