Adam Pendleton's 'Love, Queen' Reframes Protest and Abstraction
Pendleton’s first solo show in DC, featuring new paintings and a major video work.
Summary
- ‘Love, Queen’ is Adam Pendleton’s first solo show in DC, featuring new paintings and a major video work.
- The exhibition blends abstraction, language and protest history.
The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC is hosting Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the city. On view through January 3, 2027, the show features new and recent paintings, along with a large-scale video installation, in the museum’s second-floor galleries.
Pendleton is known for blending painting, drawing, and photography. He starts his pieces with ink, shapes, and text on paper, then photographs and layers them using screen-printing. The result is a bold visual language that mixes abstraction, minimalism and conceptual art.
The exhibition includes Pendleton’s signature “Black Dada,” “Days,” “WE ARE NOT,” and “Composition and Movement” paintings. These works often use only two colors over black backgrounds, drawing attention to gesture and language.
Also debuting is “Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?),” a video projected floor to ceiling. The piece uses archival images of Resurrection City, the 1968 protest camp tied to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Combined with found footage and flashes of geometric shapes, the film blurs the line between history and abstraction. The score, by Hahn Rowe, includes a recording of poet Amiri Baraka.
Curated by Evelyn C. Hankins with support from Alice Phan, Love, Queen runs alongside the museum’s permanent collection.
Hirshhorn Museum
Independence Ave SW &, 7th St SW
Washington, DC 20560
