About Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton (born 1983 in Richmond, Virginia) is a New York–based conceptual artist celebrated for his radical and multi-disciplinary practice. Working across painting, collage, film, text, printmaking, and large-scale installations, Pendleton employs a distinctive black-and-white visual language that reimagines history and challenges dominant cultural narratives. His work draws inspiration from Dada, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and the Black Arts Movement, reconfiguring their legacies into a uniquely contemporary framework.

Central to Pendleton’s practice is his ongoing exploration of Black Dada, a concept he first articulated in his 2008 manifesto. He describes it as “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.” By reframing abstraction and Black avant-garde practices together, Pendleton creates a space for imagining alternate presents—where identity, culture, and history are fluid and constantly redefined.

His artworks often incorporate layered text fragments, archival images, and geometric abstraction, producing compositions that are both visually striking and intellectually rigorous. This approach allows him to collapse traditional categories of art and history, offering audiences new ways of engaging with narratives of race, memory, and resistance.

In addition to his large-scale installations and paintings, Pendleton has produced highly regarded limited edition prints, which extend his visual language into collectible formats for a global audience. These editions, like his canvases, embody his conceptual investigations while making them accessible to a wider circle of collectors.

Through his innovative blending of mediums and ideas, Adam Pendleton has established himself as one of the most important voices in contemporary art today. His work not only disrupts established historical frameworks but also expands the possibilities of how art can articulate identity and collective memory in the 21st century.

“Pendleton is a rare artist in his ability to synthesise disciplines and mediums, and to steer with collaborators towards “total works,” which yet remain drafts of a larger essayistic practice. His works—like those of his many avant-garde forebears—are experimental in the truest sense. He sets up a laboratory in which our social and political desires can appear, however fleetingly. Historical materials (images, sounds, and printed language) become a point of departure for making present what cannot be grasped by representations of history (narratives, archives): the emergence of events and situations, which can only become known retroactively.” – T. Donovan, ‘Adam Pendleton‘, in BOMB Magazine, 2011

Auction record: US$605k, Christie’s, New York, 2022

Notable exhibitions

Adam Pendleton has exhibited internationally at some of the world’s leading museums, underscoring his status as a major voice in contemporary conceptual art. His work has been shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Chicago; the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; and Tate Liverpool, reflecting broad institutional recognition.

He gained early attention with his participation in landmark group shows such as Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2005) and the Venice Biennale (2015), which helped introduce his Black Dada practice to a global audience. His first career retrospective, Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?, was staged at MoMA in 2021, transforming the museum’s atrium into an immersive installation of paintings, text, sound, and video.

Other major solo presentations include the Baltimore Museum of Art (2022), the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2017), and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2017). These exhibitions highlighted his innovative use of abstraction and language to reframe historical and cultural narratives.

Pendleton’s artworks - including his highly regarded limited edition prints - are now held in major public collections, further affirming his influence as one of the most significant conceptual artists of his generation.