The Gardner Museum continues to celebrate art on its exterior facade with a new work by Adam Pendleton: Untitled: (Fang Man from the Upper Ivindo Area, Northern Gabon, 1905-6/ Furnishing Fabric, French or Italian, 1725-50). Pendleton’s monumental art installation on the front of the Gardner Museum features an early 20th century photographic portrait of an African man set against an 18th century European silk damask from the Gardner’s collection. The portrait, taken by a French colonial officer in 1905 (two years after the Gardner Museum opened to the public), shows a bare-chested young man wearing a variety of ornaments and the warrior hairstyle of the Fang people. Pendleton found the image in a book about African sculpture and for this project decided to combine it with a luxurious fabric he’d seen at the Museum. “It’s about what’s not in the Gardner’s collection, about its colonial past and colonial future,” said the artist.

After photocopying both images from books, Pendleton created a collage that was then enlarged to 36 feet and printed on a durable mesh fabric. The resulting piece, with its dramatic size and placement, combines works representing different historical periods as a way of transforming them. Said Pendleton about his work, “…it’s really just sort of asking, what happens when these two things come together? But it is not telling, it’s asking. The work expresses itself through questions.”

Adam Pendleton was an Artist-in-Residence in 2008 and is the second artist invited to create site-specific work for the Gardner façade. The space is devoted to new work by Gardner Museum Artists-in-Residence and changes about every six months.

Adam Pendleton’s residency at the Gardner Museum was supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Thomas A. Pappas Charitable Foundation, and the Nimoy Foundation. The Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Adam Pendleton is a conceptual artist with a multi-disciplinary practice ranging from painting to publishing. He was an artist-in-residence at the Gardner Museum in 2008. Born in Richmond, Virginia, Adam Pendleton lives and works in Germantown, New York and New York City. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including shows at MoMA; Tate Liverpool; and The Kitchen in New York City. He was featured in the recent exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and has been commissioned to create a new work for the prestigious live performance biennial Performa 13. His first solo museum exhibition will be presented at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis in 2014.

Adam Pendleton: New Work
May 2, 2013, 7 pm
A conversation with Adam Pendleton and Adrienne Edwards, Associate Curator of the Performa Institute, NY.