CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/8/2019

Howardena Pindell's atomized innovation shines in 'Among Others: Blackness at MoMA'

Howardena Pindell's "Untitled #7" (1973) is reproduced from Among Others: Blackness at MoMA—launching today with a panel discussion featuring Pindell, editor Darby English, Ann Temkin, Fred Wilson and moderator Steven Nelson at MoMA PS1. "To say that Howardena Pindell's 'Untitled #7' satisfies traditional conventions of drawing, where the artist's hand guides a mark-making tool over paper, is on appearance a bit of a stretch," Jessica Bell Brown writes. "In this complex work, just over ten by eight inches, Pindell has slickly reimagined the properties of the art form by infusing her drawing with collage and printmaking elements. She began this picture with a 'soft' grid of thread set on mounts recycled from the frame shop at MoMA, where she was working as a curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books. She then turned to the detritus from paper templates she had made for large-scale paintings she was working on, using a three-hole punch to make stencils as conduits through which to squeeze acrylic paint. She kept the punched-out chads from these stencils and later numbered each one with ink. In 'Untitled #7,' Pindell playfully sprinkled a few of these chads at a time onto her makeshift grid of thread, spraying them with 3M photo adhesive as they fell. These 'dots' of paper were accordingly fixed in place in random order, building up an uneven field of atomized space."