Howardena Pindell: Paintings, 1974-1980 Reviewed in The New Yorker

It’s been far too long since New York has seen these paintings from the seventies, on unstretched, irregularly sliced canvas. Pindell made them by overlaying multicolored paper chad on thickly coated backgrounds—one coral work is so copiously painted that it resembles stucco—and repeating the process to generate rich, topographical abstractions. In the back gallery, marvel at an intricate gridded collage composed of thousands of hand-numbered dots. It’s an obsessive, whip-smart conceptual feat that opens the path to the artist’s polemical video works of the eighties, which are overdue for a show of their own. Through May 17.

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