Adam Pendleton

Through his dynamic paintings and text-based works, Black Dada pioneer Adam Pendleton (born 1984) continually focuses on the intersection between Blackness, abstraction and the avant-garde. An Abstraction is both a document and an evolution of Pendleton’s first solo show at Pace’s New York gallery in 10 years, epitomizing his “[fight] for the right to exist in and through abstraction.” Comprised of 12 paintings and 13 drawings from the artist’s Black Dada and Untitled (Days) bodies of work, hanging within a monumental, site-specific architecture consisting of five black triangular forms, An Abstraction reorders the gallery into new, unexpected spaces. Each new work also features a typographic letter from the phrase “Black Dada,” thus creating a new pictorial language for the movement.

New York-based artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) uses letters, words, drips, splashes, sprays and collected images as primary materials in his interdisciplinary practice, which spans painting, drawing, photography, film and more. Working across mediums, he blurs the boundaries between seeing and reading, between representation and abstraction. His oeuvre is informed by an ongoing interrogation of blackness, abstraction and the avant-garde, resulting in longform ambitious projects such as Black Dada.
This catalog, published on the occasion of the artist’s first comprehensive European solo exhibition, includes a selection of new works by Pendleton in which he steps outside his usual black-and-white palette and uses color for the first time. The book is brimming with illuminating texts, including essays penned by curator Marianne Dobner and the novelist Lynne Tillman, a poem by Simone White and an interview with the artist by critic Lauren O'Neill-Butler.

The catalog for Adam Pendleton’s (born 1984) 2022 exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, his first solo show in Canada, These Things We’ve Done Together features new monumental paintings from the Untitled (WE ARE NOT) series, which combine language and abstraction to erase distinctions between writing, drawing, painting and photography. Similar abstract gestures are reimagined and reexamined in a group of works on Mylar that combine layers of gestures and geometric shapes. In a third set of works—the latest iterations of Pendleton’s Black Dada drawings—he incorporates images of sprays, splatters and drips of paint from his studio walls. Supplementing these artworks is an interview between Pendleton and curator Mary-Dailey Desmarais, as well as a portfolio of 73 studio photos documenting traces of the physical and mental activity that drives his painting process.

Adam Pendleton draws on visual culture and historical archives to explore the ways in which context influences meaning. Referencing a broad range of artistic and cultural currents—including Dada, Minimalism and Black Power—Pendleton reconfigures words, forms and images to provoke critical questioning.
Published to accompany Pendleton's installation at the Museum of Modern Art, this reader serves as a primer and handbook to the exhibition and features a number of photocopied textual and visual sources, many of which directly relate to the concept, content and programming of the exhibition. The project questions the notion of the museum as repository and addresses the influence that mass movements, including those of the last decade such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy, could have on the exhibition as form. Drawing on the work of figures as disparate as Glenn Gould, Michael Hardt and Ruby Sales, Who Is Queen? seeks to explore the nexus of abstraction and politics.
Adam Pendleton (born 1984) lives and works in New York. His visually distinctive and conceptually rigorous paintings, drawings and other works deploy linguistic, political and historical material in unlikely forms and configurations.

A new artist's book by Adam Pendleton (born 1984), As Heavy as Sculpture follows Pendleton's 2021 installation of the same title, exhibited at the New Museum in New York. The book collects, repeats and processes over 80 source collages, incorporating drawings, sketches, writing and marks, often in combination with images.
Much of the language in the collages is drawn from the protests against police brutality that swept the US in 2020: Pendleton has transcribed slogans sprayed on walls and windows, combining them with his own improvised language as well as photographs of art objects and artifacts (sculptures, masks and figures). The work points to the poetic pressure that uprisings place on language itself, compressing it in some cases into the barest of forms: simple sequences like “ACAB” or “1312,” further reducible to the elements “A, B, C,” “1, 2, 3.”
In parallel with these operations of decomposition and recomposition, the collages in As Heavy as Sculpture have been duplicated, laid out across 30 sheets and folded into book signatures, creating new displacements and cuts. This folding is in effect a chance operation, a procedure of recombination and translation, resulting in arrangements of images not planned out in advance.

This new volume, designed in collaboration with American artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) and Ghanaian British artist and architect David Adjaye (born 1966), explores the blurred boundary between art and architecture. Featuring new silkscreen canvases by Pendleton and marble sculptures by Adjaye, this publication brings the artists and their works into conversation. The two collaborators discuss their respective practices and their process of working together on the creation of the exhibition at Pace, as well as notions of history, language, abstraction and space—whether architectonic or on canvas—and how these themes involve and reveal themselves in their work. Images of finished artworks are interspersed with photographs of their production, giving a behind-the-scenes look at process, from the quarrying, cutting and polishing of marble for Adjaye’s works to the meeting of ink and canvas in Pendleton’s studio.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of "Black Dada." Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents—an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze—formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls "radical juxtaposition." In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.
Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Now available in paperback, Black Dada Reader is a collection of texts and documents that elucidates "Black Dada," a term that acclaimed New York–based artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) uses to define his artistic output. The Reader brings a diverse range of cultural figures into a shared conceptual space, including Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Stokely Carmichael, LeRoi Jones, Sun Ra, Adrian Piper, Joan Retallack, Harryette Mullen, Ron Silliman and Gertrude Stein, as well as artists from different generations such as Ad Reinhardt, Joan Jonas, William Pope.L, Thomas Hirschhorn and Stan Douglas. It also includes essays on the concept of Black Dada and its historical implications from curators and critics, including Adrienne Edwards (Walker Arts Center/Performa), Laura Hoptman (MoMA), Tom McDonough (Binghamton), Jenny Schlenzka (PS122) and Susan Thompson (Guggenheim).

The work of New York–based artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) is animated by what he calls “Black Dada,” a critical articulation of blackness, abstraction and the avant-garde. Drawing from an archive of language and images, Pendleton makes collages, paintings, videos and other objects that seek to reconfigure received histories of culture.

This catalog, accompanying Pendleton’s 2018 solo exhibition at Pace London, brings together new work from his various ongoing series: the Black Dada paintings and drawings, System of Display, Untitled (A Victim of American Democracy), paintings and wall works, a video portrait of Yvonne Rainer and a monumental group of 68 works on Mylar, in which certain recurring features—photographs relating to modernism in Africa, ceramics and African masks, fragments from the pages of books and Pendleton’s own drawings—are recombined with cut-up phrases and marks, weaving contemporary and historical references into a single body of work. The book includes a text by the artist, essays from Suzanne Hudson and Alec Mapes-Frances, and a conversation between Pendleton and Rainer, moderated by Adrienne Edwards.