Adam Pendleton’s institutional solo exhibition, Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, will open at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., on 4 April 2025. This landmark exhibition will highlight Pendleton's unique contributions to American painting and serve as an anchor for the museum's 50th anniversary celebration. Adam Pendleton: Love Queen will include new and recent paintings from multiple bodies of work as well as a single-channel video work.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics. Illuminating aesthetic connections among 60 artists working in Africa, Europe and the Americas, the exhibition is among the first to examine nearly a quarter century of production by Black artists.

Pendleton’s Our Ideas #4, 2018–2019, comprises 32 prints the artist assembled into a grid. Repurposing images of tribal masks from African Chokwe, Punu and Dogon tribes, ceremonial artefacts, and photographs of Black people, he overlaid these with shapes and phrases that symbolically threaten to overflow their frames. Pendleton creates a space where the urban collides with the rural, the refined with the barbaric, and the white with the Black. 

LACMA

The new catalogue published on the occasion of the group exhibition Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman, on view at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin from 4 November 2021 until 29 January 2022, is now available for purchase. Alongside installation views and high-resolution images, the publication includes a conversation between Amy Sillman, Adam Pendleton, and Isabelle Graw.

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In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton 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, and sketching out new potential forms and vectors for Black Dada. Along with new source texts—from Toni Cade Bambara to Piet Mondrian to Clarice Lispector to Achille Mbembe—Pendleton has included conversations with some of the figures whose writing and work were featured in the earlier Reader: Thomas Hirschhorn, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Joan Jonas, Lorraine O’Grady, and Joan Retallack.

Get your copy here.