Adam Pendleton (born 1984 in Richmond, Virginia) began developing the body of work that would define his career in 2008, when he articulated "Black Dada" in a manifesto for the European biennial Manifesta 7. The text performed a precise act of appropriation: recasting Tristan Tzara's 1916 Dada manifesto — "We are not naive / We are successive / We are exclusive" — by inserting "Black Dada" before each line, then fusing that structure with a quotation from Amiri Baraka's 1964 poem "Black Dada Nihilismus," written while Baraka still used his birth name, LeRoi Jones. "Black Dada," Pendleton has explained, is "a way of talking about the future while talking about the past... looking at Blackness as an open-ended idea that is not just related to notions of race."

The paintings that emerged from this framework follow a consistent method: Pendleton photocopies reproductions of Sol LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cubes (1974), enlarges and crops the fragments, then silkscreens them onto black grounds alongside stuttering, partially legible letters spelling BLACK DADA. The pairing is deliberate provocation — grafting the language of Black radical thought onto the visual vocabulary of a movement, Minimalism, historically defined by its whiteness and its silence on race. In 2011 he began compiling the Black Dada Reader, an informally distributed, spiral-bound compendium of source texts — Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Adrian Piper — that Koenig Books later published as a formal hardcover in 2017.

That research culminated in Who Is Queen? (2021), his most ambitious work to date: three 60-foot black scaffold towers filling MoMA's Marron Family Atrium, supporting paintings, drawings, video, sound, and a single textile piece across the museum's full height. Structured around the balloon framing typical of American houses, the installation was acquired into MoMA's permanent collection — a rare distinction for a work of this scale, and confirmation of Pendleton's position at the centre of contemporary American art.

Beyond MoMA, Pendleton's work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, the Venice Biennale, and Manifesta 7, and he has held major solo presentations at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, and Tate Liverpool — an institutional footprint that has grown steadily since his first appearances in group exhibitions in the mid-2000s.

The Black Dada paintings (2008–present) remain Pendleton's foundational and ongoing series — layered fields of cropped Sol LeWitt imagery and fractured text, spelling out a phrase that never resolves into its full, legible form. Truncated, repeated, and overwritten, the letters "stutter" across the canvas, refusing the viewer a single stable reading.

Who Is Queen? (2021), his floor-to-ceiling MoMA atrium installation, transformed sixty feet of museum architecture into what curators described as "a total work of art for the 21st century" — paintings, drawings, moving image, and a sound piece anchored by a reading from Amiri Baraka, exploring Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde as a single, continuous inquiry rather than separate historical threads.

Black Dada Reader (2011/2017), Pendleton's compiled anthology of source texts spanning European Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement, functions as both scholarly apparatus and artwork in itself — an anti-canon built through what the artist calls "radical juxtaposition."

Adam Pendleton's editions extend the same method of appropriation and fragmentation that defines his paintings and installations — silkscreen and screenprint processes that mirror how the Black Dada canvases themselves are constructed: photocopied, cropped, enlarged, layered. A print by Pendleton is not a simplified restatement of a larger work; it applies the identical operations of quotation and juxtaposition at a different scale.

His editions frequently draw directly from major bodies of work — including pieces connected to Who Is Queen? and the ongoing Black Dada series — offering collectors access to the same conceptual apparatus that has placed his work in MoMA's permanent collection and in private collections including those of Laurene Powell Jobs and Leonardo DiCaprio.

For collectors, Pendleton's text-based prints and editions provide a genuine entry point into a practice still gaining market recognition relative to its institutional weight. Works are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and Tate Liverpool.