Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a New York-based artist and a central figure amongst a cross-generational group of painters defining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction in the 21st century. Known for formally inventive and conceptually rigorous works that blur distinctions between the act of painting, drawing, and photography, Pendleton’s paintings and drawings feature a variety of sprayed, stenciled, and layered gestures, as well as textual fragments and fields. A polymath, Pendleton also edits critical anthologies, makes films, and composes site-specific exhibitions and sculptural interventions. For over a decade, Pendleton has articulated his approach to art through the framework of Black Dada, an evolving inquiry into the relationship between Blackness and abstraction. 

Pendleton has been the subject of solo exhibitions worldwide at institutions including the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (2018); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2020); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021); mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2023); and Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri  (2023–2024), among many others. His forthcoming solo exhibition, Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., will debut in the spring of 2025. Writing for The New York Times, Siddhartha Mitter described the critically acclaimed 2021 exhibition, Who Is Queen?, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as one that “built [its] own museum inside MoMA – an experiment in change from within, offering a radically different method of display from the chronological unfolding of the Modernist canon in the institution’s galleries.” 

In 2024 Pendleton received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The artist’s work is held in major public collections worldwide including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.