Pendleton’s work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Carnegie Museum of Art, and
Tate Modern in London, among others. 2017 has been a banner year for the New York-based artist who had three solo and five groups shows across the U.S. and in Berlin and Austria. Currently, his work can be seen in Public Movement: On Art, Politics, and Dance, in Stockholm Sweden, Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and I am you, you are too at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His solo show, Front Room: Adam Pendleton, was recently on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where he's been newly appointed to the Board of Trustees.
The artist is a voracious reader who uses his personal library of words and images to disrupt and reconsider preconceived notions of history and culture as they relate to the avant-garde and current and past socio-political movements. The animating force of his work is found in Black Dada—the artist’s term for a broad conceptualization of blackness. Black Dada combines “Black,” which Pendleton describes as “an open-ended signifier” and “Dada,” a nonsense word which recalls the name of the radical artistic movement that developed in response to the horrors of World War I by producing absurdist artwork that challenged the social order. A core question the artist addresses is: What does Black Dada look like? By fragmenting, layering, and collaging materials he reveals new and unexpected relationships between the past and present, language and image, and abstraction and representation.
You can see more work by both artists, from their websites: SHANTELL MARTIN l ADAM PENDLETON. Here's a slide show of Adam's Venice Biennial presentation at the Pace Gallery Website. Can't get enough of Shantell Martin? I know...neither can we!!! Check out this cool video by The New Yorker: SHANTELL MARTIN: FOLLOW THE PEN.
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