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. 

Known for his formally inventive and conceptually rigorous works that blur distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing, and photography, his paintings and drawings feature a variety of sprayed, stenciled, and layered gestures, as well as textual fragments and textual fields. He is decidedly a polymath who edits critical anthologies, makes films, and composes site-specific exhibitions and sculptural interventions.

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.