CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/12/2022

Adam Pendleton's 'Who Is Queen?' reader is a Staff Pick for Black History Month

Featured spreads are from the Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? reader, published to accompany the remarkable four-story installation comprised of paintings, drawings, sculpture, video works and audio collage that is “overwhelming” the Museum of Modern Art’s monumental atrium through February 21. “Who Is Queen? is an evolution of the Black Dada project,” curator Stuart Comer writes in his Introduction. “In it, Pendleton has continued his extensive archival research, this time focusing in part on the archives of two institutions—The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis—in order to consider the traditional role of museums as repositories. Who Is Queen? also considers the aesthetics of protest, particularly of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements, two of the most significant civil-rights campaigns of the past decade.… Who Is Queen? proposes an experimental encounter between social and artistic forms. It is a superstructure in which the perceived fixity of cultural and institutional memory is placed in contrapuntal relation to the social composition of collective protest and popular movements—to ‘compositions of bodies and everything that activates them, including voices, gestures, images, affects, architectures and refrains,’ as the artist has said. Who Is Queen? recalibrates the museum, from a rigid frame designed to regulate official accounts of history into an open, generative, and polyphonic device, the machine of endless variation described in the Black Dada manifesto.”