NEW YORK, NY.- All 35 works from Adam Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? exhibition that was staged at The Museum of Modern Art in 2021-2022 have been acquired by MoMA. This acquisition includes paintings and drawings from Pendleton’s Black Dada and WE ARE NOT bodies of work, as well as three videos, including Notes on Resurrection City, Notes on the Robert E. Lee Monument, Richmond VA (figure), and So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam.

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Who Is Queen?, an immersive floor-to-ceiling installation that spanned five stories in MoMA’s Marron Atrium, combined paintings, drawings, and filmic works into a spatial collage that fashioned a total work of art for the 21st century. Writing for The New York Times, Siddhartha Mitter described the exhibition as one that “built [its] own museum inside MoMA—an experiment in change from within, offering a radically different method of display from the chronological unfolding of the Modernist canon in the institution’s galleries.”

Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? was organized by Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, with Danielle A. Jackson, former Curatorial Assistant, and Gee Wesley, Curatorial Assistant, and with the support of Veronika Molnar, Intern, Department of Media and Performance, MoMA.

Adam Pendleton, a central figure in American painting, continuously redefines the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. Upending linear compositional logic, Pendleton’s paintings are created by a distilled layering of gesture, fragment, and form that mirrors the cacophony of contemporary experience.

Each painting comes to life through its expressionistic flourishes, stark contrasts, and subtle use of material, tone, and finish, as well as a precision reminiscent of minimal and conceptual art. Generative and poetic, his paintings create fluid and essential spaces for seeing, thinking, and feeling.

Pendleton’s painting process begins on paper by exploring the full breadth of mark-making. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, while integrating fragmentary text and geometric forms through stenciling techniques. These works on paper are photographed and subsequently combined using a screen printing process. Blurring distinctions among painting, drawing, and photography, the resulting paintings are a tangible manifestation of his belief in painting as a powerful “visual and conceptual force.”

In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2024–25); Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light, mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2023–24); Adam Pendleton: To Divide By, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2023–24); Quiet as It’s Kept: 2022 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022); and Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–22). His landmark solo exhibition Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen opened in April 2025 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and will be on view through January 2027.

Pendleton’s work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate Modern, London; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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