A Reading and Conversation with Adam Pendleton

Mast Books
72 Avenue A

New York, NY
Tuesday, February 26
7–10 PM

Pace Gallery is pleased to invite you to a special reading by Adam Pendleton from his publications Black Dada Reader and Our Ideas, followed by a conversation with the audience.

This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP is required.

Black Dada Reader is a collection of texts and documents that elucidates “Black Dada,” a term that acclaimed New York–based artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) uses to define his artistic output. The Reader brings a diverse range of cultural figures into a shared conceptual space, including Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Stokely Carmichael, LeRoi Jones, Sun Ra, Adrian Piper, Joan Retallack, Harryette Mullen, Ron Silliman and Gertrude Stein, as well as artists from different generations such as Ad Reinhardt, Joan Jonas, William Pope.L, Thomas Hirschhorn and Stan Douglas. The Reader also includes essays on the concept of Black Dada and its historical implications from curators and critics including Adrienne Edwards (Walker Arts Center / Performa), Laura Hoptman (MoMA), Tom McDonough (Binghamton), Jenny Schlenzka (PS122) and Susan Thompson (Guggenheim).

Our Ideas, a catalog accompanying Pendleton’s 2018 solo exhibition at Pace London, brings together new work from his various ongoing series: the Black Dada paintings and drawings, System of Display, Untitled (A Victim of American Democracy), paintings and wall works, a video portrait of Yvonne Rainer and a monumental group of 68 works on Mylar, in which certain recurring features—photographs relating to modernism in Africa, ceramics and African masks, fragments from the pages of books and Pendleton’s own drawings—are recombined with cut-up phrases and marks, weaving contemporary and historical references into a single body of work. The book includes a text by the artist, essays from Suzanne Hudson and Alec Mapes-Frances, and a conversation between Pendleton and Rainer, moderated by Adrienne Edwards.