Her work explores texture, color, structures, and the process of making art; it is often political, addressing the intersecting issues of racism, feminism, violence, slavery, and exploitation.

[17] There were twenty artist cofounders, including Nancy Spero, Agnes Denes, Barbara Zucker, Dotty Attie, Judith Bernstein, Harmony Hammond, Maude Boltz, Louise Kramer, and others.

[16] In the 1980s, Pindell was the victim of a hate crime at Stony Brook, where she found her office door covered in black paint.

This report spanned seven years, where she surveyed art institutions and galleries in New York State that featured Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American artists and designers.

[31] Following her graduation from the MFA program specializing in painting at Yale University in 1967, Pindell moved to New York City.

David Bourdon writes: "By 1974, Pindell developed a more three-dimensional and more personal form of pointillism, wielding a paper punch to cut out multitudes of confetti-like disks, which she dispersed with varying degrees of premeditation and randomness over the surfaces of her pictures.

"[8][33] One example of this is a 17 x 90 inch, untitled drawing-collage from 1973; Pindell used more than 20 thousand hand-numbered paper dots to form vertical and horizontal rows with rhythmic peacefulness, uniting order and chaos .

[8] The late 1940s to early 1950s were muses, as Pindell drew inspiration from a root beer bottle she remembered from a childhood trip while with her parents in Ohio.

Experimenting with circles in pieces such as Untitled #3C[36] actually enabled her to repair her relationship with the shape, as she told the New York Times: “I get great pleasure out of punching holes.”[19] Pindell also began work on her "Video Drawings" series in 1983.

[37] She became interested in the artificial light from her television monitor, and began to write out small numerals on acetate, which she stuck to the TV screen.

[37] These experiments lead to a long series of works that featured her drawings over sporting events and news broadcastings, including televised elections.

[37] The spray paintings of the early 1970s, which made use of the scrap pieces of paper from which holes had been punched, were dark and smoldering, yet there was also a shimmering light.

This appearance of light would carry on as Pindell began building up the punched out dots on the canvas, sometimes even sprinkling glitter across the surface, too.

In these years, Pindell described feeling great influence in her work from the Black Power and feminist movements, as well as from exposure to new art forms during her day job at MoMA and her travels abroad (particularly to Africa).

[38] She became fascinated by African sculpture exhibited at MoMA and in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and began to mirror the practice of encoding and accumulation in her own work.

A few large-scale works have a similar effect of looking totally white from a distance but actually being made up of tiny dots of colored paper, sequins, and paint.

At this time, she also began combining the ideas of the video drawings and the hole-punched works; she started adding numbers to each individual hole punch and arranging them in extremely neat rows.

'"[44] From this vantage point, Pindell began expending a particular focus on racism in the art world, a subject on which she has published multiple writings.

[12][38] Over the years, she has visited five continents and lived in Japan, Sweden, and India for periods of time, all the while producing new work and lecturing/writing on racism and the art community.

[40] During this time, her pieces also became increasingly political, addressing women's issues, racism, child abuse, slavery, and AIDS.

This later series is reminiscent of an earlier work about South Africa that features a slashed canvas roughly stitched back together and the word "INTERROGATION" laid on top.

In 2021, she was compared to Jack Whitten, Sam Gilliam, and Charles Gaines as part of an experimental wave of Black artists originating from late 20th century.