ADAM PENDLETON et al.
Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept (group show)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
6 April – 5 September 2022
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Adam Pendleton is participating in the eightieth edition of the Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept. Presenting works by 63 artists, the exhibition is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York until 5 September 2022. Established to chart developments in art of the United States, the Whitney Biennial is the longest-running exhibition of its kind.
“How do you make sense on an emotional, intellectual, and pragmatic level of the visual residue one leaves behind?” This is a pivotal question for Adam Pendleton’s recent abstract paintings on view at the institution, which involve a process of accumulation in which the surface of the canvas teems with sweeping gestures, language, drips, splatters, and moments of erasure in a reflection of how we evolve in life. Pendleton has explained that these works “verge on the monumental; they can take months to make and capture a deep history of marks and impressions. Minor moments become major moments because of how they articulate who we are or who we might be at any given moment. It’s a visual poetics of disruption.” These paintings, Pendleton has suggested, ask: “how do you leverage, subvert, and deploy your subjectivity? We all are doing it all of the time. It becomes more interesting when we’re aware that we’re doing it.”
Adam Pendleton began making video portraits ten years ago. In September 2016, he heard activist Ruby Sales on Krista Tippett’s public radio program On Being. As he has recalled: “She was posing a very simple question: ‘Where does it hurt?’ It's a question that urgently gets to the heart of the matter about being American.” He researched Sales and learned about her near shooting by a segregationist construction worker and part-time deputy sheriff in 1965. Jonathan Daniels, a white seminary student working alongside her in the civil rights movement in Alabama, took the shotgun bullet for her and was killed instantly. After the incident, she did not speak for months. Over the course of filming Sales, Pendleton realized there was another layer to the story—one “that was never told about her life and who she loves, how she loves, maybe even why she loves.”
Pendleton’s earlier video portraits have featured subjects including artist Lorraine O’Grady; choreographers Yvonne Rainer, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Kyle Abraham; queer theorist Jack Halberstam; and Black Panther Party founding member David Hilliard.
Whitney Museum of American Art
ALBERT OEHLEN, ADAM PENDLETON
Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman (publication)
Published by Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London / Holzwarth Publications, 2023
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.
Learn more
ADAM PENDLETON
Who Is Queen? Vols. 1–5 (publication)
Published by DABA, New York
October 2022
Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo show Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021–2022, the 5 volume book series Who Is Queen? adapts conversations between pairs of notable writers, theorists, philosophers, and musicians into contrapuntal texts. Transcripts of the original dialogues are intertwined with archival photographs and external texts.
DABA Press
ADAM PENDLETON
Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths: Revisiting the Black Dada Reader (publication)
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.