Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen
Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen is a major exhibition of new and recent paintings alongside a single-channel video installation at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Presented in the Museum’s second-floor inner-ring galleries, it marks Pendleton’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, and considers both the Museum’s architecture and the history of the National Mall.
The exhibition brings together works from Pendleton’s Black Dada, Days, and WE ARE NOT series, as well as new paintings from his Composition and Movement series. His layered, often two-color works combine gestural abstraction, minimal and conceptual art, and the visual play of concrete poetry. Pendleton develops his compositions through paint, spray paint, ink, watercolor, text fragments, geometric forms, and stenciling on paper, then photographs and screen-prints those studies to blur the boundaries between painting, drawing, and photography.
A central component is Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?), a new floor-to-ceiling video work incorporating archival and moving images of Resurrection City, the 1968 encampment on the National Mall associated with Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Documentary material, found footage, darkness, strobing light, and geometric forms move between representation and abstraction. The score by multi-instrumentalist composer Hahn Rowe includes a reading by the late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka, accompanied by brass, woodwinds, and drums. The exhibition serves as a counterpoint to collection-survey exhibitions displayed in adjacent galleries.
When: April 4, 2025–January 3, 2027
Venue: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Location within venue: Second-floor inner-ring galleries
Works included: Paintings from the Black Dada, Days, WE ARE NOT, Composition, and Movement series, along with the video work Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?)
Video: A single-channel, floor-to-ceiling projection using documentary, found, still, and moving images
Score: Composed by Hahn Rowe, with a reading by Amiri Baraka and brass, woodwind, and drum instrumentation
Artist: Adam Pendleton, a prominent contemporary American painter whose work explores abstraction, gesture, language, process, and the relationship between painting, drawing, and photography
Exhibition organization: Organized by Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator, with support from former curatorial assistant Alice Phan
Catalogue and programs: The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with scholarly essays, Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs
Accessibility: An accessibility brochure is available, with printed and braille copies at the Museum
Tickets: Price not available