Adam Pendleton - What is the Black Dada

Adam Pendleton’s What is the Black Dada (2020) is a signed limited edition artwork that extends his seminal Black Dada project, using language as a visual and political form. Produced with transferred pulp and stenciled text on handmade cotton paper, the composition merges avant-garde strategies with Black cultural history, foregrounding repetition, fragmentation, and graphic force.

This limited edition print of 35 exemplifies Pendleton’s conceptual practice, positioning text-based abstraction as a critical tool for examining identity, power, and historical narrative in contemporary art.

Adam Pendleton is a New York–based conceptual artist whose work is defined by a rigorous black-and-white visual language and a multidisciplinary approach spanning painting, printmaking, text, collage, film, and installation. Drawing on influences from Dada, Conceptualism, Minimalism, and the Black Arts Movement, Pendleton reconfigures historical materials into graphic, text-driven artworks that challenge how history is written, remembered, and experienced.

Central to his practice is the concept of Black Dada, articulated in his 2008 manifesto, which functions as a fluid framework for examining the intersections of Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. Across his signed limited edition prints and artworks, Pendleton uses repetition, fragmentation, and appropriation to "imagine alternate presents," positioning history as an active, evolving construct rather than a fixed narrative. His contemporary art prints and works on paper have been exhibited internationally at institutions including MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Tate Liverpool, underscoring his influential role in contemporary art.