Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen is a landmark solo exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, marking Pendleton’s first solo show in Washington, DC. The exhibition presents a significant body of new and recent paintings, along with a single‑channel video work, installed across the Museum’s second‑floor inner‑ring galleries from April 4, 2025, through January 3, 2027. The exhibition’s title, Love, Queen, echoes themes of transformation and performance—qualities central to Pendleton’s practice—and engages directly with the architecture of the Hirshhorn and the symbolic landscape of the National Mall.

Pendleton is known for his conceptually rigorous paintings that begin on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments that resemble broken letters. These experiments are sometimes tightly controlled and at other times freely improvised. He photographs these initial compositions and layers them via screen‑printing, deliberately blurring the lines between painting, drawing, and photography. The show features works from his Black Dada, Days, WE ARE NOT, and new Composition and Movement series. Typically composed in two colors on black‑gessoed grounds, the paintings evoke gestural abstraction, minimalist and conceptual art, and concrete poetry. The artist has said, “Painting is as much an act of performance as it is an act of translation and transformation.” In the same gallery, Pendleton debuts a new video work, Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?), projected floor to ceiling. The video uses still and moving images from Resurrection City—the 1968 encampment on the National Mall that was the culmination of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign—interwoven with found footage and flashes of geometric forms, dissolving boundaries between abstraction and representation. The score, composed by multi‑instrumentalist Hahn Rowe, integrates a reading by poet and critic Amiri Baraka with an orchestration of brass, woodwinds, and drums.

The exhibition is curated by Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator, with support from former curatorial assistant Alice Phan. It is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue containing scholarly essays, as well as Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs. The Hirshhorn recently acquired the first part of a major promised gift of Pendleton’s archive of works on paper.

Name: Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen
Venue: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, second‑floor inner‑ring galleries
When: April 4, 2025 – January 3, 2027
Tickets: Price not available; check the museum for admission details (general admission is free at the Hirshhorn, though some exhibitions may require timed passes)
Artwork Featured: Black Dada, Days, WE ARE NOT, Composition, and Movement series of paintings; new video Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?) with a score by Hahn Rowe
Accessibility: An accessibility brochure is available in print, braille, and online; printed copies and braille versions can be obtained at the Museum
Note: This is Pendleton’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC; the show includes a new video work and is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue and free public programs