Adam Pendleton Brings Black Dada to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk
Adam Pendleton’s exhibition ‘Some Wild Kind of Language’ opens at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and runs through 17 January 2027. It features 11 paintings and eight large drawings that draw on his Black Dada framework, which blends avant-garde ideas, abstraction, and Blackness. Pendleton discusses his resistance to rules and his layered process of mark-making, photography, and screen printing.
Pendleton was born in Richmond, Virginia, and has shown at institutions such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Since 2008, his Black Dada framework has joined experimental art traditions, abstract forms, and Blackness. The Stedelijk presentation includes 11 paintings and eight large drawings, on view from 10 October 2026 to 17 January 2027.
His method begins with marks on paper. He photographs those marks, then transfers and layers them onto canvas through screen printing. Though rooted in painting, his practice also draws on photography, film, text, and installation. Reading shaped his early thinking about words as tangible ideas that can create alternatives to everyday experience.
This exhibition may encourage museum audiences in Amsterdam to engage with how abstraction, language, and Black identity can coexist. It could expand public conversation around contemporary art’s relationship to race and history, while offering artists and curators a model for resisting fixed categories. Visitors unfamiliar with Pendleton’s work may encounter new ways of thinking about mark-making and archives. Its impact may remain cultural and discursive rather than broadly societal.