ADAM PENDLETON
Who is Queen? Fantastic at MOMA
American artist Adam Pendleton’s first solo show in New York City consists of a large-scale installation at the Museum of Modern Art and it is fantastic. The show, titled Adam Pendleton: Who is Queen? opened on September 18th and runs through January 30, 2022.
Adam Pendleton (b. 1984) lives and works in New York City. He works in several different mediums, and his works are known for playing with linguistic, political, and historical material in order to explore Blackness, abstraction, the avant-garde, and the relationship between them. The installation is on view in The Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium, on the second floor of the museum, and is inspired by the work of figures such as pianist Glenn Gould, political philosopher Michael Hardt, and activist and public theologian Ruby Sales. It challenges the idea of the museum as a repository and explores how the exhibition as a form can be influenced by mass movements such as the recent Black Lives Matter protests, for example. Featured are paintings, sculptures, videos, and a sound collage incorporating speech and music. The MoMA will also be publishing a series of conversations organized and moderated by Pendleton on a monthly basis at moma.org, the audio of which will be incorporated into thee sound collage.
The installation was developed over the past decade. As stated by the organizers, it “forms an alternative structure for the examination of history as an endless variation, the installation is a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art—for the 21st century.” Pendleton himself has stated that: “Who Is Queen? is undergirded by a kind of Afro-optimism balanced by an abiding Afropessimism. It is optimistic in a deeply American sense of the word, and pessimistic along those same lines. That is to say, it is not black or white, and locates each within the other. It articulates the ways in which we simultaneously possess and are possessed by contradictory ideals and ideas.”
Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? is organized by Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, with Danielle A. Jackson, former Curatorial Assistant, and Gee Wesley, Curatorial Assistant, and with the support of Veronika Molnar, Intern, Department of Media and Performance. Comer has expressed that: “Who Is Queen? is Adam Pendleton’s most ambitious project to date, interweaving the many strands of deep research and experimentation that have distinguished his career. Working across poetic, spatial, architectural, linguistic, painterly, sonic, cinematic, and political means, this ‘total artwork’ reverse-engineers the idea of the museum, breaking down entrenched models of history into building blocks that can be remixed into new possibilities for the future.”
The artist’s breathtaking work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions throughout his career at institutions such as g Kunstverein, Amsterdam (2009), The Kitchen, New York (2010), Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017), Baltimore Museum of Art (2017), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2018), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2020), Le Consortium, Dijon (2020), and now The Museum of Modern Art, New York. If that wasn’t impressive enough, in 2017 his book Black Dada Reader, which is made up of documents and essays relating to the conceptual framework of Black Dada, was published and was named one of the best art books of 2017 by The New York Times.
Do not miss the opportunity to step into this amazing installation. Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? is on display on MoMA’s second floor until January 30, 2022.
