Whitney Biennial 2022: 
Quiet as It’s Kept

Floor 6

Born 1984 in Richmond, VA
Lives in New York, NY

“How do you make sense on an emotional, intellectual, and pragmatic level of the visual residue one leaves behind?” This is a pivotal question for Adam Pendleton’s recent abstract paintings on view here, which involve a process of accumulation in which the surface of the canvas teems with sweeping gestures, language, drips, splatters, and moments of erasure in a reflection of how we evolve in life. Pendleton has explained that these works “verge on the monumental; they can take months to make and capture a deep history of marks and impressions. Minor moments become major moments because of how they articulate who we are or who we might be at any given moment. It’s a visual poetics of disruption.” These paintings, Pendleton has suggested, ask: “how do you leverage, subvert, and deploy your subjectivity? We all are doing it all of the time. It becomes more interesting when we’re aware that we’re doing it.”

Adam Pendleton began making video portraits ten years ago. In September 2016, he heard activist Ruby Sales on Krista Tippett’s public radio program On Being. As he has recalled: “She was posing a very simple question: ‘Where does it hurt?’ It's a question that urgently gets to the heart of the matter about being American.” He researched Sales and learned about her near shooting by a segregationist construction worker and part-time deputy sheriff in 1965. Jonathan Daniels, a white seminary student working alongside her in the civil rights movement in Alabama, took the shotgun bullet for her and was killed instantly. After the incident, she did not speak for months. Over the course of filming Sales, Pendleton realized there was another layer to the story—one “that was never told about her life and who she loves, how she loves, maybe even why she loves.”

Pendleton’s earlier video portraits have featured subjects including artist Lorraine O’Grady; choreographers Yvonne Rainer, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Kyle Abraham; queer theorist Jack Halberstam; and Black Panther Party founding member David Hilliard.