NEW ORLEANS: Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton Becoming Imperceptible installation view via @cacnola/Instagram.

Being Imperceptible

April 1 - June 16, 2016

CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER

900 Camp Street

New Orleans, LA

From cacno.org:

On the heels of the artist’s presentation at the 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy, the Contemporary Arts Center is proud to organize the largest solo museum presentation of Adam Pendleton’s (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) work in the United States. Including film, wall paintings, ceramics, silkscreens (on mylar, plexiglass, steel, and canvas), Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible frames the artist’s oeuvre as a complex dialogue between culture and system, a body of work invested in the perpetual cross-referencing of aesthetic and social histories.

At the center of this exhibition are the found images, which have served as the artist’s source material throughout his practice. Reframed, reconditioned, and perpetually reoccurring, these images have been described by the artist as “indistinct.” And yet, harvested from the artist’s personal library, from texts and films ranging from The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945 - 1994 and “Black Dada Nihilismus” by LeRoi Jones (later re-identified as Amiri Baraka) to Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, the images serve as bedrock for Pendleton’s artistic practice and connect his form of abstraction with the history of the American Civil Rights Movement, the pre-war Avant-Garde, La Nouvelle Vague in film, and Minimalist and Conceptualist art practices of the 1960s.

Becoming Imperceptible takes its name from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, with whose philosophical works Pendleton has long engaged, and positions Pendleton’s practice as a kind of counter-portraiture. If traditional portraiture figures the subject in contrast to or against its background, Pendleton’s works aim to disappear or camouflage the subject amid constantly alternating surfaces. Becoming Imperceptible welcomes its audiences at once into the history of Civil Rights and Black Resistance movements, Black aesthetic traditon, and the historical avant-garde. It calls on histories that have indelibly shaped American culture as it opens up a rigorous conversation about system and form in the European, African, and American avant-gardes of the last century.

Exhibit Link

Adam Pendleton: The Making of an Art-World Star

‘Being Imperceptible’: Adam Pendleton in New Orleans 


Adam Pendleton At Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans

LONDON: Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton artwork image via pacegallery.com.

New Work

April 16 – 23 May 23, 2015

PACE LONDON

6 Burlington Gardens, first floor gallery

London, UK

From pacegallery.com:

Pace London is delighted to present New Work, the gallery’s second solo exhibition by the American artist Adam Pendleton. This show precedes Pendleton’s presentation in the Belgian Pavilion of the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Pendleton’s cross-disciplinary practice draws from experimental literature, Dadaism, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. His work also references African-American political and cultural movements from the 1960s to today, including the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements.

The exhibition, presented in the first floor gallery, will feature oil on canvas paintings, a large site-specific wall work, a sculptural work, and a silkscreen piece from his INDEPENDANCE series, all of which explore the relationship between politics, language, and race, and consider how history bears on the present.

In his new Black Lives Matter paintings Pendleton responds to the political demonstrations that erupted following the highly publicized deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. The series’ eponymous phrase became a rallying cry across the United States following the fatal Ferguson, Missouri shooting of Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old black man, by Darren Wilson, a white police officer.

Pendleton’s new paintings – made with what he describes as a low-tech “painting machine” – have a unique surface that lies between handmade and machine-made. The machine sprays the phrase on an abstract ground, creating a tension between overt and abstract modes of representation. He has also created a wall work that is an enlargement of a collage featuring the phrase “BLACK LIVES MATTER.” These new works echo a sentiment expressed by Judith Butler in the New York Times: “One reason the chant ‘Black Lives Matter’ is so important is that it states the obvious but the obvious has not yet been historically realized.”

Pendleton also continues to expand the visual language of his Black Dada project, whose core paintings depict cropped images of Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) with isolated letters from the phrase “BLACK DADA.” A sculpture composed of these letters will rest against the walls of the gallery. The sculpture’s mirror-polished steel surface has been silkscreened with pages from the Black Dada Reader, an anthology edited by the artist. This new work brings the letters from his Black Dada paintings into three-dimensional form.

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia, USA) has been included in significant exhibitions in America and Europe including the Palais de Tokyo’s La Triennale (2012), where his video installation BAND was presented following its premiere at The Kitchen, New York (2010). Other important exhibitions include Adventure of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015 (2015), Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Disappearance of the Fireflies, Collection Lambert, Avignon, France, 2014; Love Story - Anne and Wolfgang Titze Collection, 21er Haus and Winter Palace, Vienna, Austria, 2014; Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2014; Joan Jonas & Adam Pendleton, Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon, 2014; We Love Video This Summer, Pace Gallery, Beijing, China, 2014;Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2013); Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Greater New York, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York (2010); The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2010); Afro-Modernism: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, Tate Liverpool (2010); Manifesta 7, Trentino-South Tyrol, Italy (2008); After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2008); Object, The Undeniable Success of Operations, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008); Manifesto Marathon, The Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Performa 07, New York (2007); Talk Show, Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2007); Resistance Is, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007); Frequency, Studio Museum of Harlem, New York (2005-06); and Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since the 1970s, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2005).

Pendleton’s Black Dada Reader anthology will be published in spring 2015 by Mousse Publishing and will feature contributions from Adrienne Edwards, Laura Hoptman, Tom McDonough, Jenny Schlenzka, and Susan Thompson.

Pendleton’s work is found in numerous public collections including Tate Modern, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

The artist lives and works in New York.

Exhibit Link

Adam Pendleton: The Making of An Art-World Star

NEW YORK: Tony Lewis, Adam Pendleton

Tony Lewis, Time After Time, 2015. Photo courtesy Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL.

Sharon Hayes, Tony Lewis, Adam Pendleton

March 6 - April 25, 2015

Opening reception: Thursday, March 5, 2015, 6 - 8pm

ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY 2

544 West 24th Street

New York, NY

From Andrea Rosen Gallery e-blast:

Andrea Rosen Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of work by Sharon Hayes, Tony Lewis and Adam Pendleton at Gallery 2. The exhibition explores the relationship between the use of language and the formal and social implications of abstraction.

In this exhibition Sharon Hayes presents two works, each a fragment from a banner carried in the Women’s Strike for Equality on August 26th, 1970, that said “WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE!”. The works approximate the scale of the original banner, but the material transformation and presentation of selected letters from the word WOMEN alter the original’s legibility and seemingly straightforward declaration of meaning.

Tony Lewis presents a large graphite work on paper diptych featuring a symbol based on Gregg shorthand. These works continue Lewis's interrogation of language systems. Using the shorthand symbols, these works are at once technically more specific while becoming increasingly gestural and abstract.

Presenting a painting from his well-known body of work "Black Dada" as well as a work from a series layering text and images on mirrored stainless steel, Adam Pendleton's works in this exhibition give material form to the artist's engagement with a dynamic idea of history; one that is ever mutable and reflective of subjective and infinite narrative potentials.

Instrumental in the thinking about this exhibition is a 2006 essay about Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work by Miwon Kwon. In it she argues: "the radicality of FGT's work lies in the insinuation of the particular in the place of abstraction, while simultaneously destabilizing the particular as a fixed positivity. And with this complex move, the artist accomplishes a remarkable reversal: everyone becomes a particularly marked subject, making it impossible for there to be an unmarked, invisible, hierarchy-determining point of reference. Which means that no one is less than public either." Kwon's text provides a useful lens for reading these works as well, offering a possible way for abstraction to engage with specific histories, politics, and identities.

Sharon Hayes was born in 1970 in Baltimore, MD. She has had major solo exhibitions at the Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Art Institute of Chicago, and most recently at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work has been widely exhibited in significant exhibitions including The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale; the 2010 Whitney Biennial, documenta 12 (collaborative project), Kassel; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Generali Foundation, Vienna; Museum Moderner Kunst (MUMOK), Vienna; Artists Space, New York; New Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Istanbul Biennale. Hayes has been recently granted the Alpert Award in the Arts. The artist lives and works in New York.

Tony Lewis was born in 1986 in Los Angeles, California. Recent exhibitions have taken place at Massimo de Carlo, London; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Room East, New York; Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago; and Autumn Space, Chicago. His work was presented in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and will be the focus of an upcoming solo show at Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago. Lewis lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Adam Pendleton was born in 1984 in Richmond, Virginia. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Galleria Pedro Cera, Lisbon; Pace Gallery, New York; Shane Campbell Gallery, Lincoln Park; Travesia Cuatro, Guadalajara; and Pace Gallery, London. Pendleton's work recently included in group exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, London; 21er Haus and Winter Palace, Vienna; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Pace Gallery, Beijing; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Swiss Institute, New York; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Pendleton lives and works in Germantown, New York, and Brooklyn, New York.

This exhibition is organized by Cory Nomura.

Exhibit Link

EVENT: Conversation Among Friends / New York / July 21, 2014

Images: Adrienne Edwards, 2013. Photo by Whitney Browne; Adam Pendleton, 2012. Photo by Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Courtesy Pace Gallery.

Featuring artist Adam Pendleton and Adrienne Edwards, Associate Curator, Performa

Monday, July 21, 2014

7:00 p.m. program | 8:15 p.m. reception

Doors open at 6:45 p.m.

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The Celeste Bartos Theater (Theater 3)

The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building

4 West 54^th Street

New York, NY

GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS ($35), MEMBER TICKETS ($20) MAY BE PURCHASED AT THE MUSEUM INFORMATION AND FILM DESKS, ONLINE AT MOMA.ORG, OR THROUGH THE FRIENDS OF EDUCATION OFFICE.

ALL TICKETS WILL BE HELD AT DOOR.

Presented by The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art as part of the series Conversations: Among Friends, this event features a conversation between artist Adam Pendleton and curator, scholar, and writer Adrienne Edwards. Following the program, guests are invited to continue the conversation and meet the participants at an intimate reception catered by Fantasy Fare in the Cullman Mezzanine.

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a Conceptual artist known for his multidisciplinary practice, which moves fluidly between painting, publishing, photographic collage, video, and performance. His work centers on an engagement with language, in both the figurative and literal senses, and the re-contextualization of history through appropriated imagery in order to establish alternative interpretations of the present and, as the artist has explained, “a future dynamic where new historical narratives and meanings can exist.” Pendleton has been included in significant exhibitions in America and Europe, includingLove Story – The Anne & Wolfgang Titze Collection, Winter Palace and 21er Haus, Belvedere, Vienna (2014); La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, MoMA, New York (2012); Greater New York 2010, MoMA PS1, New York (2010); The Generational: Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2010); Afro-Modernism: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, Tate Liverpool (2010); Manifesta 7, Trentino-South Tyrol, Italy (2008); After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2008); Object, The Undeniable Success of Operations, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008); Manifesto Marathon, The Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Performa 07, New York (2007);Talk Show, ICA, London (2007); Resistance Is, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007); Frequency, The Studio Museum of Harlem (2005–06); and Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since the 1970s, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2005).

Adrienne Edwards is a curator, scholar, and writer of performance with a focus on artists of the African diaspora and the Global South. She is an associate curator at Performa and a PhD candidate in performance studies at New York University, where she is a Corrigan Doctoral Fellow. Edwards’s research interpolates visual and time-based art, experimental dance, critical race theory, feminist theory, and post-structuralist philosophy. She has curated and co-organized numerous performance art projects, including Rashid Johnson's first live work, Dutchman; Dave McKenzie's All the King's horses...none of his men; Clifford Owens's Five Days Worth; Fluxus founding member Benjamin Patterson's first retrospective concert Action as Composition; and Pope.L's Cage Unrequited; among others. Edwards is a contributor to numerous exhibition catalogues and art publications—including Clifford Owens: Anthology, for MoMA/PS1, Performa, 11 for Performa, Fore, for the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Wangechi Mutu, for the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney—and is performance reviews editor for the journal of feminist theory Women & Performance.

Event Link

NEW YORK: Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton, video still from My Education: A Portrait of David Hillard, 2011-2014. Image via pacegallery.com. 

April 4 – May 3, 2014

PACE GALLERY

534 West 25^th Street

New York, NY

From Pace Gallery press release:

Pace Gallery  is pleased  to  present  an  exhibition of  new  works  in  various  media  by  Adam Pendleton. On display in his first exhibition in New York since 2010, are four new 10-by-5 foot silkscreens on mirror polished stainless steel, a large “painting” made in black silicone as well as a video installation, My Education: A Portrait of David Hilliard, (2011-2014).

Adam  Pendleton  is known  for  his  investigations into uses of language and history,  through  works  that reconfigure and shift text and image to challenge accounts  recorded by widely accepted chronicles  and as a means  to present  the images and voices of those whose views have gone largely  under  recognized. He continues this practice in My Education: A Portrait of David Hilliard, a multiple large-screen v1deo installation filmed in Oakland, California in 2011.

The subject of this work, David Hilliard, is a lecturer, educator, and founding member and former Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party.  In My Education:  A Portrait of David Hilliard, Pendleton films Hilliard as he takes the viewer through the Oakland neighborhoods that were home to the Black Panther movement, from the lots, houses, and storefronts where the Black Panthers set up free meal programs for the area's youth to the site of a fatal gun battle that took place on April 6, 1968, two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  That day, in a confrontation between Oakland police and members of the Black Panthers, two policemen were seriously wounded, as were others on both sides of the battle, and Black Panther Treasurer Bobby Hutton was fatally shot. Recorded history states that the Panthers initiated the firefight through an ambush.  Hilliard, who was present at the time, states that the Panthers were followed and surrounded by police, who initiated the fight.

In quiet, contemplative tones and shot in black and white, My Education:  A Portrait of David Hilliard uses multiple camera angles to reveal different, contrasting views of the same subjects, and the film raises questions and invites  discussion about a fraught moment in American history that continues to ripple through society.  The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art provided the original funding for My Education: A Portrait of David Hilliard.

The exhibition also includes four works that look closely at the random and arbitrary disturbances that currents and wind play on the surface of water. The s1lkscreen ink on mirror polished stainless steel pieces, all from 2014, are studies of pattern and light that, through the reflective media, incorporate the viewer and environment  into the oversized panels. Three of the four pieces are untitled, and the last is For David.

Black Sun (2013-2014) is a work that inverts the expected. Based on a drawing of the sun by the late Sun Ra, the work captures the sun as a series of circles and whirls with jagged spikes that break out through the edges of the star. Cast in black silicone, Black Sun synthesizes the limits of representation and abstraction.

For nearly ten years, many contemporary thematic exhibitions have included work by Adam Pendleton (b.1984, Richmond, Virginia). Most recently his work was featured in the touring exhibition, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, which originated at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2012- 2013).

Adam Pendleton has been included in significant  exhibitions in America and Europe including the Palais de Tokyo's La Triennale (2012), where his video  installation BAND was presented following its premiere at The Kitchen, New York (2010);  Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, MoMA, New York (2012);  Greater New York,  MoMA  PS1, New  York (2010); The  Generational:  Younger  Than  Jesus,  New  Museum,  New  York (2010);  Afro-Modernism: Journeys  through  the Black  Atlantic, Tate Liverpool  (2010);  Manifesta 7, Trentino­ South Tyrol, Italy (2008); After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy ,  High Museum of Art, Atlanta  (2008);  Object,  The  Undeniable Success  of Operations,  Stedelijk  Museum,  Amsterdam  (2008); Manifesto Marathon, The Serpentine  Gallery, London (2008); Sympathy  for the Devil: Art and Rock and Rolf Since 1967, Museum of Contemporary  Art, Chicago (2007); Performa 07, New York (2007); Talk Show, ICA, London (2007);  Resistance  Is, The Whitney Museum  of American  Art, New York (2007);  Frequency,  Studio Museum   of  Harlem  (2005-06);   and Double   Consciousness:  Black   Conceptual  Art  Since   the   1970s, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2005).

Adam Pendleton's work is found in numerous  public  collections  including The Museum of Modern Art, New York;  the  Museum  of Contemporary   Art,  Chicago;   the  Carnegie  Museum  of  Art, Pittsburgh;  the  Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Museum of Contemporary  Art, San D1ego; and The University of Chicago, Illinois.

The artist lives and works in New York City and Germantown, NY.

Exhibit Link