Adam Pendleton: Our Ideas

by Suzanne Hudson, Adam Pendleton (Artist), Yvonne Rainer (Contributor)

The work of New York–based artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) is animated by what he calls “Black Dada,” a critical articulation of blackness, abstraction and the avant-garde. Drawing from an archive of language and images, Pendleton makes collages, paintings, videos and other objects that seek to reconfigure received histories of culture.

This catalog, accompanying Pendleton’s 2018 solo exhibition at Pace London, brings together new work from his various ongoing the Black Dada paintings and drawings, System of Display , Untitled (A Victim of American Democracy) , paintings and wall works, a video portrait of Yvonne Rainer and a monumental group of 68 works on Mylar, in which certain recurring features―photographs relating to modernism in Africa, ceramics and African masks, fragments from the pages of books and Pendleton’s own drawings―are recombined with cut-up phrases and marks, weaving contemporary and historical references into a single body of work. The book includes a text by the artist, essays from Suzanne Hudson and Alec Mapes-Frances, and a conversation between Pendleton and Rainer, moderated by Adrienne Edwards.

172 pages, Hardcover

Published February 19, 2019

About the author

Suzanne Hudson is the author of two literary novels, In a Temple of Trees and In the Dark of the Moon. Her short fiction has been anthologized in almost a dozen books, including Stories from the Blue Moon Café and The Shoe Burnin’: Stories of Southern Soul. Her short story collection Opposable Thumbs was a finalist for a John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her latest work of short stories, All the Way to Memphis, brings characters from the South to life in a way any reader will know and love. She lives with her husband, author Joe Formichella, near Fairhope, Alabama.