Adam Pendleton (b. 1984 USA) works in multiple media, including silkscreen, installation, performance, sculpture and text. His conceptual practice composes formal templates into which he slots information, shifting language, forms and images into the arena of artistic inquiry. Practicing extreme freedom of reference and quotation, as well as a rejection of conventional hierarchies among sources, Pendleton establishes new referential devices and displays. He adopts existing imagery and text, drawing on a wide range of cultural and political references, as a means to free them from their existing frameworks.

Pendleton's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum, New York; the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; and the Tate Liverpool. Recent biennials and exhibitions include Greater New York, MoMA/PS1, Long Island City, New York;The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York; Performa 07, New York; Manifesta 7, Trentino-South Tyrol, Italy;Object, The Undeniable Success of Operations, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam;Hey Hey Glossolalia, Creative Time, New York;Manifesto Marathon at The Serpentine Gallery, London;The Future as Disruption, The Kitchen, New York;Talk Show, ICA, London;Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock n' Roll since 1967, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, High Museum, Atlanta; and ELTDK Amsterdama three-part exhibition organized by Kunstverein and de Appel, Amsterdam in 2009.

Adam Pendleton came to the Gardner Museum in the Fall of 2008 when the academic fervor of the city was in full swing. Pendleton attended lectures and events in Boston and in Cambridge and used his time at the Gardner to begin a new body of work, System of Display, which have featured prominently in his exhibitions since the winter of 2008. One of the System of Display works included in a solo exhibition in Berlin, Germany, incorporated the pattern of a silk furnishing fabric Mrs. Gardner originally used to cover the Yellow Room walls. Pendleton also spent many hours looking in the collection and in particular, studying the contents of the covered cases speckled throughout the galleries. In November, he was invited by Joan Jonas to participate in her second reiteration of Reading Dante, a live reading and video performance held during Gardner After Hours. Filmed excerpts from this performance are now incorporated into Jonas' current Reading Dante video piece.

Pendleton returned in December 2010 to perform a newly conceived work for the last Gardner After Hours program to be held in the Tapestry Room. This program entitled three scenes (variation one), used texts from sources the artist has been working with since 2007. It followed three scenes, a 2009 commission by Kunstverein (Amsterdam) in which material from all of Pendleton's performances to date was assembled and re-appropriated; invoking the notion of a retrospective. three scenes (variation one) incorporated a re-orchestrated interpretation of Stephin Merritt's pop song The Book of Love with vocalist Colin Killalea, a string quartet made up of Emily Deans, Marika Hughes, Yon Joo Lee and Mazz Swift, and a vocal solo by classically-trained singer Alicia Hall Moran.