Adam Pendleton valuation
Black Dada — language, silkscreen and spray, arranged as an argument about how history is written.
Adam Pendleton was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1984 and did not go to art school, moving to New York at eighteen and showing by his early twenties.
What a work by Adam Pendleton is worth
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Bio
Adam Pendleton was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1984 and did not go to art school, moving to New York at eighteen and showing by his early twenties. He works under a heading he calls Black Dada, taken from a poem by Amiri Baraka, which sets the historical avant-garde alongside Black radical thought and treats neither as settled. The paintings are silkscreened and sprayed in black and white on canvas and Mylar, layering fragments of text, redacted documents, photographs of the civil rights and Black Lives Matter movements, and letterforms broken down until they are almost illegible.
A market driven strongly by institutional acquisition since the mid-2010s, with the large silkscreen-and-spray paintings on canvas leading it. The surfaces are matt, black-dominant and unvarnished, which makes any scuff, fingerprint or retouch highly visible and difficult to correct; condition matters accordingly. Works on Mylar are physically delicate and are usually framed to a specification that forms part of the work. Editions and artist's books exist in modest numbers. Provenance to a documented gallery or museum source is the usual reference.
Wallspace, Pace and the Black Dada Reader
Pendleton finished school two years early and went to an independent study programme at Pietrasanta in Italy instead of college. His first solo show, Being Here, was at Wallspace in New York in 2004, and in 2012, at 28, he joined Pace. Becoming Imperceptible opened at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans in 2016 and travelled to Cleveland and Denver.
In 2017 he published the Black Dada Reader, a sourcebook of texts by writers and artists from Hugo Ball and Gertrude Stein to Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael and Adrian Piper. The Museum of Modern Art in New York showed Who Is Queen? in its atrium in 2021, and in 2024 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' award for painting.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
