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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. On your next visit to the Museum of Modern Art, you can't miss Adam Pendleton's new installation, and I mean that in the literal sense. You can't miss seeing this five-story multimedia piece comprised of dark ladder-like scaffolding that soars 60 feet in the air, flanked by two large screens projecting images of civil rights movements past and present.

There's audio of poetry, large painted panels. The title of the show is Who is Queen, a riff on something that was said to the artist that got under his skin. Who is Queen falls under what Pendleton describes as his Black Dada Manifesto. Pendleton has said, "History is an endless variation, a machine upon which we can project ourselves and our ideas. That is to say, it is our present moment."

Well, Pendleton has had a relationship with MoMA since 2012. This is the 37-year-old artist's first solo show at a New York institution. Who is Queen opened this month, and is up until the end of January 2020. Adam Pendleton joins us now. Hi, Adam.

Adam Pendleton: Hi, Alison. Thanks for having me this afternoon. Happy to be here.

Alison Stewart: When you were first invited to take over the whole atrium of MoMA for this project, what did you think?

Adam Pendleton: Well, I thought many things because the atrium at MoMA is such an iconic space in the New York City Museum. I think, of course, the biggest challenge that is probably apparent to everybody who walks into the atrium is that it is such a monumental and tall space. It's quite an unusual space for one to exhibit their work in. I had to reckon with that challenge and figure out how to create the space that would be both monumental and intimate at once.

Alison Stewart: How did you embrace that challenge?

Adam Pendleton: I reached out to an architect.

[laughter]

Adam Pendleton: I reached out to the New York-based architect Fred Tang, Frederick Tang of Frederick Tang and associates. Over many years, I think Fred and I worked on this scaffolding for about four or five years. The scaffolding is modular in nature. It can really steal any space, no matter how wide or how tall it is, it adapts to the dimensions of the space that it is in. That was a very organic but I would also argue poetic solution that we came up with together.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious if you thought about people seeing it from different levels because it's so tall. Now, with the new MoMA, you can see. If you're on the ground, you're in it, it surrounds you. If you go to the second level and look at it, you're looking down at the screens. If you go one more, it's really sort of this omniscient look. I ran up and down the stairs doing this. I'm curious when you were creating it, did you have that in mind, or was that something that evolved as you got in the space?

Adam Pendleton: It was a bit of both, I have to say, and I'm glad you went and basically climbed the scaffolding because it's true. If you go to the different floors of the museum, you can go from one level of the scaffolding to the next layer to the next level to the next level. It does completely change your perception of the exhibition. I did think about that a lot. When you're constructing something that is a 60-foot tall object in space, it's hard to imagine what it's going to do to the space until you're actually standing in front of it.

I would be lying if I said I knew exactly what was going to happen. I think the most unexpected thing that occurred is that yes, it's a 60-foot tall sculpture, one could say. When you're on different levels in the museum, it actually appears almost small and very intimate and very delicate, almost like someone built it out of toothpicks, and that I did not expect at all.

Alison Stewart: What is the material?

Adam Pendleton: It is painted wood. It's really just the 2 x 4s, you would go and get at let's say Home Depot and black bear paint. There are these simple adjustments that had been made to the wood and the way in which the paint has been applied so it's sprayed instead of brushed. The 2 x 4s you usually buy have a rounded edge on them, but these 2 x 4s have a square edge. That slight difference completely changes your perception.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Adam Pendleton. We're talking about his new installation, Who is Queen, at MoMA. The title Who Is Queen comes from something someone said to you that somewhat offended you. When did you realize that this offense and your reaction to this comment could be the basis for a piece of work?

Adam Pendleton: It's not so much that it offended me, Alison. It's more that I'm interested in the way in which we are seen by others, and how there's often a gap in the way in which we see ourselves and the way someone else might see us at any given moment. Queen in gay slang, one could say could be a term for an effeminate gay man. "You're such a Queen." "Oh, stop acting like a queen," kind of curled in a playful, loving, or perhaps in a derogatory way.

It was more, "Oh, this is how this person sees me but this isn't necessarily how I see myself." It is about claiming who you are and who you want to be and realizing that who you are and who you want to be is not fixed or finite but it's always fluid.

Alison Stewart: The phrase 'who is Queen' is on these painted panels, on some of the panels. One spans like the whole width of one of the structures. They're are intermittent on the structure. What would you like people to consider as they look at these painted panels with some language on it?

Adam Pendleton: Well, for one, they are paintings. There's a difference between a painted panel and a painting for sure.

Alison Stewart: Painting, I meant painting, yes.

Adam Pendleton: I would love for them to on the onset realize that. Also, I would like them to dwell in the pleasures of process and I think that's one of the very core things at the heart of painting is process and how it informs and influences what we're looking at. That really is what painting is for me, it's a process that unfolds over a very extended amount of time. It's not something that I think you can do quickly but it's a very different kind of temporal reality than what we experience on a daily basis.

I want people to slow down and recognize that they're having a very particular kind of encounter with something that was not done quickly but that was done slowly with a lot of consideration. Where everything was considered even if something feels like it was done spontaneously that it was still done with a particular kind of attention and intention at the same time.

Alison Stewart: My guest, Adam Pendleton. We're talking about his piece, Who Is Queen. Let's talk about the video a little bit. You're from Richmond, Virginia. We have a degree of separation because my sister lived in Richmond for 30 years. I texted my niece, who's about your vintage and I said, "Did you know Adam Pendleton," she goes, "Yes, his mom taught at Collegiate two and his younger sister was a year behind me or in my year, I think. I listened to an interview he did recently about one of his shows, pretty dope." There you go. Your former classmates think your work's pretty dope. If you're in Richmond, and anybody who's been to Richmond knows there's Monument Avenue with all of these monuments of Confederate war heroes and, of course, the giant Robert E. Lee's statue, which is featured in one of your videos covered with Black Lives Matter sayings and anti racist sayings.

First of all, as someone who grew up in Richmond, you're aware of Monument Avenue and the proms are held at plantations and the like, what did it just feel like the first time you saw the statue post-2020?

Adam Pendleton: It was funny because I went home to see my parents that I hadn't seen in maybe a year and a half during the long haul of COVID that we all know so well. When I landed, and my parents picked me up at the airport, they said, "Oh, we've got to go see the Robert E. Lee monument," and I said, "Oh, I don't have time for that," which is typical me. I never have time.

I'm always busy, busy, busy. I say, "I don't have time for that. Too much to do. Too much do." [inaudible 00:09:52] said, "No, Adam, you really got to see it." Of course, I had known at that moment that it became a focal point during the summer of protests and that it had been radically transformed, but I thought I had seen it because I had seen images of it. I think that's a mistake we too often make in contemporary life. We think we have seen things because we have seen a video of it or a photograph of it, so we don't think we need to physically see the thing itself. I was so wrong that I had seen it, because seeing it in person was absolutely transformative.

Honestly, it probably was one of the most extraordinary objects I had ever seen in person because the surface of this monument had been transformed into this kind of act of communal painting, if you will. It looks like this beautiful painting with different colors and words, and even a texture emerged. I wanted to capture that. I didn't want that to disappear.

One of the videos that is in the installation at MoMA is a visual act of documentation, a document of the monument as it existed post the protest.

Alison Stewart: You shot the footage yourself, correct?

Adam Pendleton: I shot the footage with a team of people. I wish I could have done it all alone, or actually, I don't wish I could have done it all alone because I enjoyed working with the team so much. I worked with the cinematographer, Maceo Bishop, and the producer, Miriam Schroeder, and others to capture this footage.

Alison Stewart: There's an interesting technique of using a spotlight that moves around the monument and lands on an actor.

Adam Pendleton: Exactly. The actor, Thai Richards, exactly. The thing about art is that it has to transform something. If this was simply footage of the static monument, that wouldn't be different or other to the other acts of documentation of this monument. I needed a visual way to activate the space of the frame. I came up with a simple device, and that was essentially two spotlights were projected onto the surface of the monument, and these spotlights danced around.

They were almost in dialogue with each other. They activated the frame and they activated the surface of the monument. They end up drawing you into the space of the film, of the footage in a very different way.

Alison Stewart: There's also footage of one of the-- Not as well known or often discussed civil rights protests, Resurrection City in DC, which was this encampment of anti-poverty activists and people who live below the poverty line that occupied and lived on the National Mall just South the Reflecting Pool with the Lincoln Memorial in the distance. What drew you to this footage as part of this project, Who is Queen?

Adam Pendleton: Yes, there are three video pieces, Alison. Yes, there's the notes on Robert E. Lee, then there's also the notes on Resurrection City, which you're referring to, and then there's also the video portrait of the queer theorist, Jack Halberstam. These three videos really work in relationship to each other to create a trilogy within the space of the installation at MoMA. I was drawn to Resurrection City in particular because I'm interested in the relationship between Blackness attraction and the avant-garde.

I think when we think about the avant-garde, we usually think about something that mainly happened in Europe and mainly was mostly not Black people, for example. I think that you can find tendencies of the avant-garde in unusual spaces. I think something like Resurrection City, this moment in 1968, which was the culmination of Martin Luther King's Poor People's Campaign is an example of an avant-garde moment, of an avant-garde gesture.

Where people gathered and asked society from a cultural standpoint, from a political standpoint, ask people to think differently. That is what the avant-garde is for me. It's where you propose an alternative to normative ways of being or thinking.

Alison Stewart: The name of the exhibit is Who Is Queen. It is at the Museum of Modern Art until the end of January 2022. Adam Pendleton, thank you for being with us today.

Adam Pendleton: Absolutely. A pleasure. Thank you, Alison.

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