iHirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenNational Mall
Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen
Pendleton's first solo show in Washington, DC fills the second-floor inner ring with new and recent paintings plus a single-channel video, staged for the museum's circular galleries.
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On one black canvas, the words "Love Queen" are spray-painted so faintly you have to hunt for them, like something scratched on a bathroom stall, with bubbles drifting up above. Pendleton says the title's ambiguity is deliberate.
You walk the second-floor inner ring in one continuous loop: 35 paintings, none made before 2023, mostly two colours on black gesso. The Black Dada canvases add gold and neon green, and 14 small Composition paintings hang on a black wall. The loop ends in a dark room where a nine-minute video fills the wall floor to ceiling: photographs of Resurrection City, the 1968 Poor People's Campaign camp on this same Mall, cut with flashing triangles and circles and an Amiri Baraka reading.
ARTnews rated the Days paintings best and found the new Black Dada ones "somewhat distant and cold". BmoreArt's Coley Gray called the Compositions dry and the video "stunning", then did a second lap of the paintings. Do the same. Admission is free and walk-up.
Look for
Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?)
In the last room, a 9-minute floor-to-ceiling projection of Jill Freedman's photographs of the 1968 Mall encampment, strobing with triangles and circles over Hahn Rowe's score and Amiri Baraka's voice.
Black Dada (D)
Right at the start, yellow splotches form a rough, off-centre set of wind turbine blades, with a black letter D lying on its side at the left edge.
The "Love Queen" canvas
Look for a black Days painting with "Love Queen" barely legible in spray paint near the bottom and bubble-like marks rising above it.
The Composition wall
Fourteen small paintings on a black-painted wall, where triangles, circles and squares drift apart like loose planets.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Going Solo
- Rainy Days
Skip if
You're sensitive to flashing light: the closing video strobes in and out of darkness with hard, fast edits.
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Image credits
8
- Adam Pendleton: Love, QueenPeio Erroteta / Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution
- From the Louvre: Masterpieces of Islamic ArtCourtesy of National Museum of Asian Art
- A Museum in the MakingAndrew Jameson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenGryffindor, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
- National Air and Space Museumajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
- National Museum of Asian ArtDifference engine, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- National Museum of Natural Historyajay_suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
- National Gallery of Artajay_suresh / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0