Howardena Pindell's first present to view in New York in a decade included nearly three dozen small works upon paper or papyrus--collages.

Howardena Pindell's first present to view in New York in a decade included nearly three dozen small works upon paper or papyrus--collages, prints and drawings--ranging in date from 1968 to the ready with more than half from the past several years. principally consist of countless punched-out and notated paper dots arranged in abstract, high-relief compositions within scale-setting grids of various proportions, which have been either sectored from string or hand-drawn. Pindell first started working with grids and dots in the '70 as was demonstrated in of that kind pieces as the tutti-frutti Untitled #28 (1974) with an undulating, speckl domain terraced in strips of collaged paper, or Prism #2 (1973) in which drawn-on dots are partly enmeshed in the handmade paper surface. There were also interesting earlier drawings with handwritten words or slashes accumulated in graph-paper quadrants.

Pindell is enormously inventive with the consciously limited vocabulary that situates her work in a minimalist tradition of serial theme-and-variations. At the same time, the abundance of the dots signals a remarkably unminimalist excess feeling all the more profligate for the constraints imposed. Untitled #32 (2003-04) is a telling example. Glu to a white sod sectored in green thread is a veritable profusion of dots in pair sizes, either printed with numbers and arrows in hypochondriac and black (larger), or painted a solid r (smaller). Pindell dusted the work with a sensuous layer of fine pulverized substance at the end. Festively colored, the work recalls an after-party floor, with the confetti-like dots clumping in drifts through the surface.

Pindell uses open-bite etching in her prints (there were a not many on view, including those in which dots set forth stars, numbers galaxies, and arrows the continual expansion of the universe), and the technique appears, too, at tiny scale, in dots that are punched revealed of already etched sheets. The miniature number or arrow created at this technique is surrounded on a haze of ink, a linear ambiguity enhancing the brains that the artist intends to undermine clarity in the same way or another.

Pindell has related the grids and numbers to memories of her father, who was a mathematician, and the dots to history (in segregation-era restaurants, for example, r dots painted forward dishware and utensils designated use according to black people). It is not necessary to know this in order to intellect that these works, which in such a manner effectively inhabit a territory of clandestine codes and broken rules, are in some way connected to highly personal meanings.

--Faye Hirsch

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