Adam Pendleton describes his signature Black Dada motif as a way of “looking at blackness as an open-ended idea, not just related to race, but in relationship to politics, to art, specifically to the avant-garde.” In this work, the layering of paper pulp builds its own history, much like Pendleton builds upon the history of Dada, and the layering of “Black” upon “Dada” invokes the political without prescribing to the viewer the intent of the work.

Adam Pendleton is a New-York based conceptual artist, known for a multi-disciplinary practice and his predominantly black-and-white palette. Often described as the embodiment of a new era, his work captures concepts from Dada, Conceptualism, Minimalism and the Black Arts Movement through a graphical lense. Across painting, collage, appropriation, film, text, printmaking and installations, Adam Pendleton attempts to recontextualize narratives about the past, breaking down rigid historical categories in order to “imagine alternate presents”. In his Black Dada manifesto, Pendleton stated in 2008, “History is an endless variation, a machine upon which we can project ourselves and our ideas. That is to say it is our present moment.” Under the term Black Dada, he explores the relationships between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde, and their respective histories. Adam Pendleton explains the essence of Black Dada as a fluid framing device that enables “a way of talking about the future while talking about the past. It’s about looking at Blackness as an open-ended idea that is not just related to notions of race.” Adam Pendleton‘s work has been exhibited internationally, notably at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and the Tate Liverpool.His work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate, London, among others. Adam Pendleton was born in Richmond, Virginia (USA) in 1983.

Adam Pendleton, What is the Black Dada