In this primer accompanying Adam Pendleton’s MoMA show, the artist behind “Black Dada” fuses musical counterpoint with the aesthetics of protest.

Adam Pendleton draws on visual culture and historical archives to explore the ways in which context influences meaning. Referencing a broad range of artistic and cultural currents—including Dada, Minimalism and Black Power—Pendleton reconfigures words, forms and images to provoke critical questioning.

Published to accompany Pendleton’s installation at the Museum of Modern Art, this reader serves as a primer and handbook to the exhibition and features a number of photocopied textual and visual sources, many of which directly relate to the concept, content and programming of the exhibition. The project questions the notion of the museum as repository and addresses the influence that mass movements, including those of the last decade such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy, could have on the exhibition as form. Drawing on the work of figures as disparate as Glenn Gould, Michael Hardt and Ruby Sales, Who Is Queen? seeks to explore the nexus of abstraction and politics.

Adam Pendleton (born 1984) lives and works in New York. His visually distinctive and conceptually rigorous paintings, drawings and other works deploy linguistic, political and historical material in unlikely forms and configurations. -Publisher