Adam Pendleton and Adrienne Edwards join ICA Advisory Board

The Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) welcomes two new members to its Advisory Board: artist and Richmond-native Adam Pendleton and Whitney curator Adrienne Edwards. The ICA’s Advisory Board supports the ICA at VCU in fulfilling its vision and mission to present the art of our time and provide an open forum for dialogue and collaboration.

Co-chaired by ICA founding donors Steve Markel and Bill Royall, the Advisory Board consists of artists, VCU leadership and alumni, art world professionals, business leaders, and a student representative. Members include artist and VCU alumna Diana Al-Hadid and the Director of Arts & Industries Building at the Smithsonian Institute Rachel Goslins, among others. The Board is thrilled to bring both Pendleton and Edwards into the conversation as the ICA at VCU continues to define its trajectory within the Richmond and international art world.  

Adam Pendleton, originally from Richmond, Virginia, is a New York-based artist known for work animated by what the artist calls “Black Dada,” a critical articulation of blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. Drawing from an archive of language and images, Pendleton makes conceptually rigorous and formally inventive paintings, collages, videos, and installations that insert his work into broader conversations about history and contemporary culture.

Pendleton has been the subject of solo exhibitions across the United States and abroad, at institutions including Kunstverein, Amsterdam (2009); The Kitchen, New York (2010); Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017); Baltimore Museum of Art (2017); and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2018). His 2016 solo exhibition Becoming Imperceptible was organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, before closing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.

He’s currently the subject of a two-person exhibition with Pope.l at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich (through March 16, 2019) and will open a solo exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin in April 2019. His work is held in major public collections, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Tate, London. He is currently a member of the Baltimore Museum of Art Board of Trustees.

Adrienne Edwards has been the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance at The Whitney Museum in New York since May of 2018.  Edwards is well-known for her work with Performa, where she has helped curate performance commissions since 2010. At the New York–based biennial, she has organized various thematic presentations, including “Afroglossia,” which focused on African performance art and featured new works by Teju Cole, Wangechi Mutu, and Tracey Rose, and she has helped engineer partnerships with New York institutions such as the Anthology Film Archives, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.

In addition to her projects for Performa, Edwards was curator at large at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She has held that position since 2016.  Edwards also co-led a $1 million Mellon Foundation Interdisciplinary Initiative, which supported multidisciplinary projects at the Walker. Outside of her work for museums and biennials, Edwards has independently curated exhibitions at galleries, most notably “Blackness in Abstraction,” an expansive survey of the color black in non-figurative work, for New York’s Pace Gallery in 2016. She also has contributed to Art in America, Aperture, and Parkett, among other publications.