WE ARE NOT (Composition) by Adam Pendleton

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

Museum Exhibitions

Adam Pendleton

Love, Queen

Apr 4, 2025 – Jan 3, 2027
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Washington, DC

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden announces Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, a landmark exhibition by Adam Pendleton. The artist will present new and recent paintings as well as a single-channel video work in the Museum’s second-floor inner-ring galleries from April 4, 2025, to January 3, 2027. Pendleton’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, will highlight his unique contributions to contemporary American painting while making use of the architecture of the Museum and the history of the National Mall.

“Introducing Adam Pendleton’s recent work in our 50th year is intentional,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “His exhibition reflects the Hirshhorn’s mission as a 21st-century art museum that amplifies the voices of artists responding to history and place in real time. Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen invites our almost one million annual visitors to think about the complexities of abstraction within the American experience, and its potential to forge associations among our shared past, present and future.”

“I am delighted to exhibit my work on the occasion of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary,” said Pendleton. “It presents a meaningful opportunity to engage, in subtle and poetic ways, with the Museum’s architecture, position on the National Mall and legacy of showing significant abstract and conceptual work.”

Pendleton is known for his visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings that he begins on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These visual experiments are at times carefully controlled and at others freely improvised. He photographs these initial compositions and then layers them using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing and the act of photography.

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen will feature Pendleton’s “Black Dada,” “Days,” “WE ARE NOT,” and new “Composition” and “Movement” paintings. An encounter with any of these works, typically composed of two colors on black-gessoed grounds, brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry. “Painting is as much an act of performance as it is an act of translation and transformation,” the artist has stated.

The artist will also debut “Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?),” a new video work that will be projected floor to ceiling. The work makes use of still and moving images of Resurrection City, the multiday encampment erected on the National Mall in the spring and summer of 1968, which is considered to be the culmination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Strobing in and out of darkness, the documentary material is interspersed with found footage and punctuated by flashes of geometric forms, dissolving the boundaries between abstraction and representation. The film’s score, by multi-instrumentalist composer Hahn Rowe, integrates a reading by the late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka with an orchestration of brass, woodwinds and drums.

In its totality, Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen will offer a powerful counterpoint to the Museum’s collection surveys that will be concurrently presented in adjacent galleries. The exhibition is organized by Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator, with support from former curatorial assistant Alice Phan.

“It is an honor to invite Adam Pendleton to respond to the Hirshhorn’s singular architecture and location,” said Hankins. “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen speaks to the vision of our anniversary—a period of simultaneous reflection and forward thinking, a space in which Pendleton has been operating for almost two decades.”

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with scholarly essays, Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs.

To learn more, visit (opens in a new window) hirshhorn.si.edu.
  • Museum Exhibitions — Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen at the Hirshhorn, Oct 8, 2024