Sep 10, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8 PM

In Conversation: Adam Pendleton and Theaster Gates: Honoring and Remembering Pope.L

To mark anything is to create a difference, maybe a world, maybe a wound, certainly an act, wrote Pope.L (1955–2023), an artist for whom drawing was never merely a medium but a mode of thinking about the world.

Join us in our galleries on September 10 for a special conversation with artists Adam Pendleton and Theaster Gates in remembering and honoring their friend Pope.L and his profound contributions as a visionary artist, teacher, and performer.

Please note there will be ASL interpretation available for this event.

Theaster Gates

Theaster Gates is an artist whose practice finds roots in conceptual formalism, sculpture, space theory, land art, and performance. Trained in urban planning and within the tradition of Japanese ceramics, Gates's artistic philosophy is guided by the concepts of Animism - most notably honoring the "spirit within things." Foundational to Gates's practice is his custodianship and critical redeployment of culturally significant Black objects, archives, and spaces. Through the expansiveness of his approach as a maker, Gates extends the life of disappearing and bygone histories, places, traditions, and loved ones.

Gates has exhibited widely, including recent solo exhibitions at Smart Museum of Art, Chicago (2025); Albuquerque Foundation, Sintra, Portugal (2025); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2024); Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2024); LUMA Foundation, Arles, France (2024 and 2023); New Museum, New York (2022); and Serpentine Pavilion, London (2022).
Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton is a leading figure in contemporary art. Working primarily as a painter, his work has redefined the boundaries of abstraction through a sustained engagement with process, language, and conceptual form. In 2008, he began to develop the working method for which he is now widely recognized as Black Dada—a critical framework that explores the relationship between Blackness, abstraction, and avant-garde movements. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at leading museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (through January 2027). In October, he will open a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Lead support for Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L is provided by Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis. Generous funding is provided by Jill and Peter Kraus, Sarah Arison, and Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg. Additional support is provided by Gladstone; Hilary and Peter Hatch, Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi, Modern Art, London, Adam Pendleton and Karsten Ch'ien, Vielmetter, Los Angeles, Timur Galen and Linda Genereux, the Hudgins Family, and Ann and Mel Schaffer.

Special thanks to the Estate of Pope.L and Mitchell-Innes & Nash.