"Black Dada [is a way of] looking at blackness as an open-ended idea, not just related to race, but in relationship to politics, to art, specifically to the avant-garde."
—Adam PendletonAdam Pendleton explores the intersection of the Black Arts Movement, Dada, Abstraction, and Conceptualism to examine issues of representation, appropriation, history, and identity. His multi-disciplinary art practice is situated within the conceptual framework of Black Dada, a term coined by Amiri Baraka, a Black Arts Movement leader and an American beat poet. The term is without a singular definition or understanding, but rather a fluid and abstract notion that provides “a way to talk about the future while talking about the past. It is our present moment.”
"Much like the Dadaists, Pendleton investigates the potential for language as a material to rearrange and reshape history and experience."
—Pace PrintsUntitled (Who is Queen?) shares its name with Pendleton’s 2021-2022 immersive installation in the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium. Soaring over five stories, scaffolding held mixed media works that created a layered of field text phrases and gestural marks. Pendleton’s employment of fragmented or incomplete language seeks to disrupt logic, refute the familiar, and challenge institutional authority. Thus, drawing attention to the power of language to define and redefine, to include or exclude, to acknowledge or ignore. Furthermore, through his appropriation, reconfiguration, and layering of texts by historical Black figures such as Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, or Malcolm X, Pendleton “invokes the political without prescribing to the viewer the intent of the work.”
