Photography by ANNA PLA-NARBONA

Adam Pendleton — American artist born 1984 in Richmond, Virginia. A central figure in contemporary American painting, Pendleton has redefined the medium through his exploration of abstraction and process. He started writing poetry at an early age and began painting in his basement, finishing high school two years early before attending the Artspace Independent Study Program in Pietrasanta, Italy. Moving to New York at eighteen, he developed a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, silkscreen, collage, video, and performance. Pendleton describes his work as "Black Dada"—a phrase coined by poet Amiri Baraka—exploring the relationship between Blackness and abstraction through a conceptual framework that filters ideas from the Black Arts Movement, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Dada. His paintings are created through distilled layering of gesture, fragment, and form, beginning on paper and transformed through screen-printing processes. He signed with Pace Gallery in 2012 at age twenty-eight, the youngest artist to do so since the 1970s. Major exhibitions include Who Is Queen? at the Museum of Modern Art (2021-2022) and Love, Queen at the Hirshhorn Museum (2025-2027). Pendleton jointly purchased Nina Simone's childhood home in 2017 with Ellen Gallagher, Rashid Johnson, and Julie Mehretu. He received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2024.

website:
www.adampendelton.net