“What is your name?” “Where are you from?” “How did you end up here?” “Can you feel it?” “Does it hurt?” With these and other questions, the American artist Adam Pendleton’s solo exhibition at the Kemper Art Museum sets up an elaborate call-and-response network that articulates a sense of history as fragmented poetics. The exhibition showcases a polyvocal assemblage of new and recent paintings, drawings, and video portraits that together reveal Pendleton’s interest in creating a conversation between mediums, as well as his belief in abstraction’s capacity to destabilize and disrupt.  

In this Q&A, held on the occasion of the opening of Adam Pendleton: To Divide By at the Kemper Art Museum on September 22, 2023, Pendleton was joined in conversation with Meredith Malone, curator at the Kemper Art Museum.