Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen
Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen is Adam Pendleton’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, bringing together new and recent paintings with a newly commissioned single-channel video in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s second-floor inner-ring galleries. The exhibition examines Pendleton’s impact on contemporary American painting while engaging the museum’s architecture and the history of the National Mall.
The paintings include works from his Black Dada, Days, and WE ARE NOT series, along with new Composition and Movement paintings. Built from layered gestures, fragments, geometric forms, words, paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, the works move between abstraction, conceptual art, photography, and concrete poetry. Pendleton begins by creating compositions on paper, photographs them, and recombines the images through screen printing, intentionally blurring the boundaries among painting, drawing, and photography.
The exhibition also introduces Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?), a floor-to-ceiling video that combines archival still and moving images of Resurrection City, the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign encampment on the National Mall, with found footage and flashes of geometric imagery. Its score by composer and multi-instrumentalist Hahn Rowe incorporates a reading by the late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka with brass, woodwind, and drum arrangements. Together, the works provide a counterpoint to the Hirshhorn’s collection surveys in neighboring galleries.
When: April 4, 2025–January 3, 2027
Venue: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, second-floor inner-ring galleries
Artist: Adam Pendleton
Works: Paintings from the Black Dada, Days, and WE ARE NOT series, plus new Composition and Movement paintings
Video: Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?), a new floor-to-ceiling, single-channel video
Video score: Hahn Rowe, featuring a reading by Amiri Baraka and an orchestration of brass, woodwinds, and drums
Background: The video draws on the history of Resurrection City, a multiday encampment erected on the National Mall in spring and summer 1968 as part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign.
Exhibition organizer: Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator, with support from former curatorial assistant Alice Phan
Accessibility: An accessibility brochure is available, with printed and braille copies provided at the museum.
Programs and publications: The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with scholarly essays, Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs.
Run time: Not specified; the exhibition includes a single-channel video work.
Ages: Not specified.
Tickets: Price not available