Howardena Pindell, Untitled, 1974–75

Narrator: Artist Howardena Pindell.

Howardena Pindell: I started to want to introduce the grid and so I use something equivalent to a Sharpie marker and made a grid pattern, not a small one but maybe about seven or eight inches square. And in this case there's an orange grid pattern. But from a distance it almost looks like it's sewn.

I liked the grid. I think possibly because my father was a mathematician, would have a notebook with graph paper or [it] looked like graph paper to me.

Narrator: The artist explains how she made the small circular shapes that dot the surface of this work.

Howardena Pindell: I just went to Woolworth's, my loft was near Woolworths and I bought a plain old hole puncher and then I bought file folders, manila folders. And I would cut them in strips and punch them. 

In the early work I only had one simple hole punch and I would gesso the canvas. And then I would draw the grid. And then on top of that I probably started using just white acrylic. And then I started extruding paint and sprinkling dots that had a kind of Sharpie marker quality of bleeding up, and that's what I wanted. I wanted that kind of whisper of color.