Untitled #21, 1978

Acrylic, gouache, watercolor, dye, paper, talcum powder, glitter, and sequins on sewn canvas
© Howardena Pindell; courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

Howardena Pindell has rigorously explored surface, texture, and color over a consequential fifty-year career. Alongside fellow artists Harmony Hammond and Zarina, among others, Pindell co-founded A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York, in 1972. Pindell is known for employing unconventional materials in her work, such as glitter, talcum powder, and even perfume. Perhaps most important to the trajectory of her practice, however, is the hole punch, which she started using around 1970. Crucially for Pindell’s later output, she saved the by-products of her hole-punching endeavors—thousands of tiny paper circles, known as chads—which, in 1973, began to make their way into the works themselves. After fixing canvas to the floor and spray-painting and squeegeeing acrylic paint through stencils, she applied confetti-like constellations of chads to the surface, where they adhered to the wet paint. While from a distance Untitled #21 appears uniformly painted, closer inspection reveals thousands of chads of varying sizes, which emerge as rainbow-colored flecks from beneath layers of paint.