Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton (born January 5, 1984, in Richmond, Virginia) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, drawing, screenprinting, photography, video, film, installation, sculpture, performance, text, and publishing. Known for an approach that continually moves between abstraction and language, Pendleton constructs densely layered works from gestural marks, fragmented words, geometric forms, photographs, archival imagery, and appropriated cultural material. His paintings often begin as works on paper incorporating paint, spray paint, ink, watercolor, stencils, drips, and text; these compositions are then photographed, enlarged, layered, and transferred through screenprinting, intentionally collapsing distinctions among painting, drawing, and photography.  Central to Pendleton’s practice is Black Dada, a term and conceptual framework he began developing in 2008 to investigate relationships among Blackness, abstraction, language, political history, and the historical avant-garde. Rather than treating Black identity or history as fixed subjects that can be straightforwardly represented, Black Dada allows fragments of language, imagery, gesture, and historical documents to encounter one another without settling into a single meaning. His work draws from sources spanning Amiri Baraka, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Black Lives Matter, Dada, conceptual art, concrete poetry, experimental film, Minimalism, and histories of civil-rights organizing.  Pendleton’s interest in archives and political history extends beyond painting. His films and video portraits have focused on artists, writers, choreographers, and thinkers including Lorraine O’Grady, Yvonne Rainer, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Jack Halberstam. For projects including Who Is Queen? and Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?), Pendleton has drawn from archival documentation of the Black Panther Party, Resurrection City, the Poor People’s Campaign, and other sites of collective political action, restructuring documentary material through montage, repetition, abstraction, sound, and fragmentation.  Pendleton studied at the Artspace Independent Study Program in Pietrasanta, Italy, from 2000 to 2002 before moving to New York at eighteen. He was an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2008–09 and has since presented major projects at the Museum of Modern Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Whitney Museum of American Art, mumok in Vienna, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and other institutions. In 2024, he received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His current major museum presentations include Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen at the Hirshhorn, on view through January 2027; Can I Be? at the Langen Foundation in Germany; and Some Wild Kind of Language, opening at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in October 2026. Pendleton lives and works between Brooklyn and Germantown, New York.