Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
Adam Pendleton (American, b. 1984)
Events Are (Semia Culture), 2007
Silkscreen on canvas
Collection of DePaul Art Museum, gift of Nancy & Robert Mollers
2016.8
Adam Pendleton is a conceptual artist and self-proclaimed “Black Dadaist.” In the early 20th century, European Dadaism was an art movement used to express artists’ rejections of war and capitalistic society. It championed pun and play over rationality. For Pendleton, “Black Dada refers to Dada in an arguably illogical way. So much of Dada was about the absurdity of life, and there’s something absurd about America today. I couldn’t help but respond as an artist—and a citizen.”
Pendleton reinvents blackness in historical narratives through techniques borrowed from absurdist poetry and minimal compositions, often putting equal emphasis on text and image. Events Are (Semia Culture) is a silkscreen representation of the novel For the Love of Ray by Bonnie Bremser, which details her life as a prostitute in Mexico after the imprisonment of her husband, poet Ray Bremser. Amiri Baraka, the first writer to publish Ray Bremser’s poems, produced a work in 1964 called “Black Dada Nihilism,” which influenced Pendleton’s writing of “The Black Dada Manifesto” in 2008.