Adam Pendleton
Adam Pendleton
Adam Pendleton is a New York-based artist who is a central figure amongst a cross-generational group of painters defining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction in the 21st century. In 2024 he received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Writing for the New York Times, Siddhartha Mitter described his critically acclaimed 2021 exhibition, Who Is Queen?, at the Museum of Modern Art as one that “built [its] own museum inside MoMA – an experiment in change from within, offering a radically different method of display from the chronological unfolding of the Modernist canon in the institution’s galleries.”
For over a decade, Pendleton has articulated his approach to art through the framework of Black Dada, an evolving inquiry into the relationship between Blackness and abstraction.
His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at such notable museums as mumok in Vienna (2023), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2021), Le Consortium in Dijon (2020), and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2017). His work has also been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2022), the Venice Biennale (2015), and other prominent group exhibitions, including Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum in New York (2021). Writing and publishing are central to Pendleton’s practice, and his many books include Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths (2021), Who Is Queen? A Reader (2021), Heavy as Sculpture (2021), and Black Dada Reader (2017).