Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

A critical investigation of Adam Pendleton’s deep engagement with abstraction.

Adam Pendleton’s exploration of abstraction--through painting, drawing, screen printing, sculpture, language, book arts, and film--over the past five years constitutes the core of this study and the exhibition that spawned it. The book features essays by exhibition curator Meredith Malone and senior scholars Hal Foster and Joshua Chambers-Letson along with a conversation between Pendleton and the critic and theorist Isabelle Graw. These texts illuminate the artist’s fundamental understanding of abstraction as a conscious articulation of unimagined alternatives and a mechanism of both resistance and active engagement.

Painting is a central focus of Pendleton’s work, and Isabelle Graw, in her interview with the artist, elucidates painting as a ＂primary form＂ for Pendleton, noting how the medium conceptually and theoretically informs how he moves through and operates in other forms as well as how his works address viewers as ＂cognizant participants.＂ Hal Foster takes up Pendleton’s engagement with bookmaking as another form of activation, arguing that the artist’s creative compilations of texts and images activate readers and viewers, existing as resources to help us not only survive but flourish. Joshua Chambers-Letson’s close reading of Pendleton’s experimental film What Is Your Name? Kyle Abraham, A Portrait stimulates consideration of how artistic practice can be a means to negotiate with, dance with, and live with grief at the intersection of Black and queer love and loss. Meredith Malone contextualizes Pendleton’s recent work, examining his multifaceted approach to abstraction as a ＂philosophical disposition＂ as well as a device to realize a more expansive, chaotic, and fluid space for both artist and viewer.

With more than 1,400 high-quality reproductions and full transcripts of two of the artist’s recent films juxtaposed with extensive stills from each, To Divide By is Adam Pendleton’s most ambitious publication to date. It is published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis in fall 2023.

Joshua Chambers-Letson is professor of performance studies and Asian American studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America and coeditor (with Tavia Nyong’o) of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown. Hal Foster is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle and Brutal Aesthetics. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he teaches at Princeton University, coedits the journal October, and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and Artforum.