January 3–February 11, 2018
Appropriating found images and text, Adam Pendleton brings together often divergent ideas to destabilize the present and envision new aesthetic, cultural, and political futures. His multi-disciplinary practice across painting, sculpture, video, and performance searches for “radical juxtapositions.” Since 2008, Pendleton’s process has been driven by a conceptual paradigm the artist termed “Black Dada,” which takes inspiration from Amiri Baraka’s 1964 poem “Black Dada Nihilismus.” List Projects: Adam Pendleton features Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer (2016–17) alongside an installation of silkscreened mirror and glass works from the artist’s ongoing series System of Display (2008–).
Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer is Pendleton’s most recent video portrait of the dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and writer Yvonne Rainer. Over a meal Pendleton and Rainer share at a New York City diner, the video records their unscripted conversation punctuated by poignant moments when each artist leads the other. Rainer leads Pendleton in partnered movement exercises. Pendleton invites Rainer to read from a script which combines writing from her published works with accounts and discussions of inequality, racism, and anti-black violence by such voices as Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Including footage from Rainer’s 1978 documentation of Trio A, Just Back from Los Angeles stages an inter-generational dialogue across lines of sexual and racial difference, provoking critical inquiry into the artists’ shared questions of poetics and politics.
Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, VA) lives and works in New York.
Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer was a Performa Commission curated by Adrienne Edwards.
List Projects: Adam Pendleton is curated by Paul C. Ha, Director, MIT List Visual Arts Center, with Jamin An, Curatorial Fellow, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Fotene Demoulas & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Jane & Neil Pappalardo, Cynthia & John Reed, and Terry & Rick Stone.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Council for the Arts at MIT, Philip S. Khoury, Associate Provost at MIT, the MIT School of Architecture + Planning, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
