Across the monumental canvas of Adam Pendleton’s Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2020, black and white letters in irregular shapes and sizes cascade over a field of vertical streaks, layered in no rational order. The repeated phrase “WE ARE NOT” appears fragmented and partially obscured, graffiti-like in some areas, and in others reminiscent of a malfunctioning digital screen. Spray paint breaks legibility, reinforcing a sense of instability and dissonance. The formal gestures echo conceptual tensions—between certainty and ambiguity, voice and erasure, the individual and the collective. As the words reverberate across the surface, they conjure a polyphonic chorus—anonymous yet unified—that asserts, resists, and withholds. What precisely is being negated remains unstated. Inviting viewers to fill in the blanks, they are implicated in the work’s open-ended logic.

“The paintings are incomplete postulates. Like the voices of a multitude, they do not accede to an identity.”

—Adam Pendleton 

Untitled (WE ARE NOT) is an ongoing interrogation of language, identity, and abstraction through what Pendleton terms “Black Dada”—a conceptual framework he began articulating in 2008 that brings together radical Black politics and avant-garde strategies. Drawing on Amiri Baraka’s 1964 poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” and Hugo Ball’s 1916 “Dada Manifesto,” Pendleton’s own Black Dada manifesto proposes history as “an endless variation, a machine upon which we can project ourselves and our ideas.”ⁱ The phrase “we are not” first appears in that manifesto as part of a call-and-response refrain—“Black Dada: we are not naïve… we are successive… we are not exclusive”—and is reprised in the parenthetical title of this series.ⁱⁱ Pendleton challenges linear conceptions of history, proposing instead a temporal model in which it becomes possible “to talk about the future while talking about the past,” and in which identity is unfixed, generative, and multiple.

“If [history] were the past, it would not matter… History is the present.”

—James Baldwin, A Rap on Race, 1971

Pendleton’s investment in abstraction is as conceptual as it is procedural. Central to his practice is the photocopier, his self-described “machine of repetition,” through which he reproduces and degrades archival material until the image loses its original integrity. This is not an accident of medium but an aesthetic philosophy: technology becomes a mode of transformation. As he once posed the question, “Black Dada, what can Black Dada do for me?”—a recursive statement that positions art-making as both method and inquiry. Pendleton’s process-oriented approach finds resonance in the tactile innovations of Jack Whitten, who described his own works as being “processed,” and in Wade Guyton’s digitally printed paintings, which interrogate authorship through technological mediation. In all three cases, the machine is not a neutral tool but a collaborator, shaping both the image and the meaning it carries.

In Untitled (WE ARE NOT), Pendleton embraces a looser, more visceral formal language than in his earlier monochromatic Black Dada canvases from 2008–2009. Combining silkscreen and spray paint, he creates a surface that feels restless, suspended between image and text, repetition and rupture. Another large-scale painting from the Untitled (WE ARE NOT) series featured prominently in Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?, the artist’s 2021–2022 solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the immersive installation’s integration of image, text, and sound echoed the conceptual strategies at play in the works themselves.

“There is certainly absence, but there is a different orientation, one that has to do with the autonomy of saying ‘we are not.’”

—Adam Pendleton

A detail of the present work was featured on the cover of Flaunt Magazine’s “Wishes” issue in February 2021. In his interview with the publication, Pendleton reframes the phrase “we are not” not as a negation, but as an “ambiguous fragment,” one that allows “the freedom to not be anything in particular, to be free of predicates and of subjecthood.”ⁱⁱⁱ The layered words, streaks, and forms in Untitled (WE ARE NOT) suggest a simultaneity that resists resolution—mirroring the painting’s invitation to inhabit multiplicity and ask not only what we are, but what we might yet become. “I think my work is often an attempt to work out what exactly it is that we wish for,” Pendleton reflects, “or, more accurately, to catalogue and improvise with the many different ways to ask oneself what one wishes for. Our wishes are often ahead of us, and the work of art occurs largely in this prior space.”^iv

ⁱ “Adam Pendleton Biography,” Museum of Modern Art, Online.
ⁱⁱ “Adam Pendleton Selected Works,” Galerie Max Hetzler, Online.
ⁱⁱⁱ Matthew Bedard, “Exploring Major Exhibition ‘Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America’ with New York’s New Museum, Now Open,” Flaunt Magazine, February 17, 2021, Online.
^iv Ibid.