Pace Prints is excited to announce the release of our first edition by Adam Pendleton, to benefit fellow artist Lauren Halsey's Summaeverythang Community Center. What is the Black Dada is a stenciled, handmade paper work, in an edition of 35. Proceeds from this edition will help provide support to Summaeverythang's mission to distribute free organic produce boxes from Southern California farms to families in Watts and South Central Los Angeles. What is the Black Dada is an exclusive Pace Prints Online Release and will be available here on Wednesday, August 19, at 11:00 am EDT.
Adam Pendleton’s work embraces the historical avant-garde by disrupting easy logic and established narratives. Much like the Dadaists, Pendleton investigates the potential for language as a material to rearrange and reshape history and experience. In “What is the Black Dada,” language and paper, traditionally used as a means to an end of communication, become both the object and subject of the work. The abstract arrangement of letters becomes the physical object, and the conceptual reinterpretation of language escapes the burden of meaning. Pendleton describes his signature “Black Dada” motif as a way of “looking at blackness as an open-ended idea, not just related to race, but in relationship to politics, to art, specifically to the avant-garde.” In this work, the layering of paper pulp builds its own history, much like Pendleton builds upon the history of Dada, and the layering of “Black” upon “Dada” invokes the political without prescribing to the viewer the intent of the work.
Summaeverythang is an incredible project, and I am delighted to be contributing to it. It's part of a long and in many ways overlooked history of community organizations creating infrastructures for autonomy, which in the midst of the current crisis has taken on renewed importance. What is the Black Dada, in its own way, signals this history and points towards others to come.
– Adam Pendleton