Adam Pendleton: James T. Demetrion Distinguished Artist Series
April 3, 2025 | 6:30 pm–7:30 pm
FREE
Advance Insider tickets available Friday, March 7, 7 PM (space is limited)
General tickets available Monday, March 10, 7 PM
We strongly recommend claiming a ticket to ensure your seat. This in-person program is expected to be at capacity.
Questions? Email Hirshhornexperience@si.edu
Hirshhorn Insiders, email HMSGdevelopment@si.edu
Adam Pendleton will join Hirshhorn Head Curator Evelyn Hankins for a conversation examining painting’s central role in his art practice. They will also discuss his new video work, which uses Resurrection City—the 1968 Civil Rights encampment on the National Mall—as a starting point to explore how collective action generates transformative change.
Adam Pendleton (b. 1984) is a central figure in a cross-generational group of painters who are redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. His paintings challenge convention by blurring distinctions among painting, photography, and drawing, rendering visually active and spatially complex works that give visual form to what the artist describes as the “complex real”—the onslaught of sensory phenomena and often contradictory information that defines contemporary experience.
His painting process begins on paper and explores the full breadth of mark-making. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, integrating fragmentary text and geometric forms through stenciling techniques. These works on paper are photographed and then layered using a screen-printing process. The resulting paintings are at once expressionistic, minimal, and conceptually rich.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Adam Pendleton’s work has been shown at major museums around the world. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light, at mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2023–2024); Adam Pendleton: To Divide By, at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2023–2024); Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022);Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2022); and Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–2022).
Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and Tate Modern, London.
In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
—
If you have questions or a request for access services or accommodations that can make your experience more inclusive, please contact hirshhornexperience@si.edu. One to two weeks’ advance notice is recommended but not required.
—
This annual program is made possible by the Friends of Jim and Barbara Demetrion Endowment Fund, established in 2001 to celebrate Jim Demetrion’s seventeen-year tenure as the Hirshhorn’s second director.
Images: Portrait of the artist. © Adam Pendleton. Photo: Matthew Septimus. Adam Pendleton, WE ARE NOT (Composition), 2024. Silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas; 19 x 15 in. (43.3 x 38.1 cm). © Adam Pendleton. Photo: Andy Romer
