Adam Pendleton, Who Is Queen?

Adam Pendleton (American, b. 1984) is a conceptual artist who uses historical and aesthetic content from visual culture to explore the ways in which context influences meaning. Drawing from a substantial archive that references both artistic and cultural movements, including Dada, Minimalism, Black Power, and the Civil Rights movement, among others, Pendleton reconfigures words, forms, and images to provoke critical questioning. Published to accompany a multimedia installation at MoMA, this reader serves as a primer and handbook to the exhibition and features an artist intervention of photocopied textual sources, many of which directly relate to the 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, can have on the exhibition as form. Drawing on the work of figures as disparate as Michael Hardt, Ruby Sales, and Glenn Gould, Who Is Queen? seeks to explore the nexus of abstraction and politics.