Involvement Series

Wanda Pimentel began her decade-long Involvement Series around 1965. As she put it a few years later, “My studio is in my bedroom. Everything has to be very neat. . . . I work alone. I think my issues are the issues of our time: the lack of perspective for people, their alienation. The saddest thing is for people to be dominated by things.” Throughout the series, Pimentel used a vivid yet limited color palette to depict domestic objects in enigmatic, compressed interiors. In this painting, a pair of feet peek out from below the horizon-like line of a red ironing board. The only other clues to the feet’s owner are the blouses on a rack and the ready iron: the trappings of stereotyped female labor and identity.