Adam Pendleton (b. 1984 Richmond, Virginia) is a central figure among a cross-generational group of painters redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings begin on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These compositions are photographed and then layered using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing, and photography. An encounter with any single work, typically composed of two colors on black gessoed grounds, brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry.

Pendleton is decidedly a polymath who edits critical anthologies, makes films, and composes site-specific exhibitions and sculptural interventions. Writing for The New York Times, Siddhartha Mitter described his critically acclaimed 2021 exhibition, Who Is Queen?, at the Museum of Modern Art 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." For over a decade, Pendleton has articulated his approach to art through the framework of Black Dada, an ever-evolving inquiry into the relationship between Blackness and abstraction.

His work has been shown at major museums around the world. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light, at mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2023–2024); Adam Pendleton: To Divide By, at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2023–2024); Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2022); and Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–2022). His forthcoming solo exhibition, Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, will debut in the spring of 2025.

Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Tate Modern, London.