Lenhardt Lecture: Adam Pendleton in conversation with Dr. Adrienne Edwards

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984) is a central figure in contemporary American painting who has redefined the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? (2021–22) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together (2021–22) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept (2022) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White and Light (2023–24) at the mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Adam Pendleton: To Divide By (2023–24) at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics (2024-25) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (2025–2027).

Pendleton’s work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among many others. In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Dr. Adrienne Edwards is the Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she most recently curated Edges of Ailey (2024–25). Edwards has been a curator at the Whitney since 2018. From 2021-2024, she served as the Whitney’s Director of Curatorial Affairs. Edwards co-curated Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept and enhanced the strength and vitality of the Museum’s performance program. Her forthcoming exhibition Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zig Zags, Rivers will be the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York City.

In 2022, Edwards was the President of the International Jury of the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as a jury member for the 40th anniversary edition of Videobrasil in 2023 and the selection committee for the curatorship of the Berlin Biennale in 2018. Prior to the Whitney, she served as curator of Performa in New York City and as Curator at Large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where she oversaw the Mellon Interdisciplinary Initiative.

In addition to more than 50 commissions in film, performance, and the visual arts, her curatorial projects have also included the thematic intergenerational and interdisciplinary exhibition and catalogue Blackness in Abstraction presented at Pace Gallery (2016); the traveling exhibition and catalogue Jason Moran at the Walker Art Center, ICA Boston, and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018–19); “Moved by the Motion: Sudden Rise” (2020), a series of performances based on a text co-written by Wu Tsang, boychild, and Fred Moten at the Whitney; and Dave McKenzie’s first solo museum exhibition in New York City The Story I Tell Myself and its pendant performance commission “Disturbing the View” (2021) at the Whitney; among many others.

Edwards has taught art history, performance, and visual studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York University, and the New School, and has contributed essays to academic journals, artist monographs, group exhibition catalogues, and art magazines as well as other publications. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University and is also currently Professor of Practice in the Department of English and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University.

The David and Dawn Lenhardt Lecture engages Valley audiences with some of the most acclaimed contemporary artists in the world. In 2018, the inaugural lecture presented New-York based artist Jim Hodges, and subsequent lectures have featured artists Shara Hughes, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Arcmanoro Niles, Teresita Fernández in converation with Amalia Mesa-Bains, Derek Fordjour, Rashid Johnson, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe in conversation with Larry Ossei-Mensah, Leonardo Drew, Lily Stockman, Eamon Ore-Giron, and Charles Gaines in conversation with Thelma Golden.
The Lenhardt Lecture is made possible through the generosity of The Dawn and David Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative and is supported in part by Prime Steak Concepts.