Adam Pendleton and Kwame Onwuachi want their work to linger in your mind and body long after any sort of direct encounter has ended. In a rave review of Tatiana, Onwuachi’s impossible-to-get-into New York restaurant, The New York Times said his truffle-blanketed twist on a bodega chopped cheese boasted “an ambiguity that we’re more used to finding in art.” Pendleton, for his part, is a master of such polysemy. In “Love, Queen,” a major solo exhibition opening April 4 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, he presents paintings that aren’t quite paintings, developed through a head-spinning process of mark-making, photography, digital manipulation, and screen printing.
Both creatives draw on the history of DC in their latest work. One of Onwuachi’s latest restaurants, Dōgon, is inspired by the contributions of Benjamin Banneker, a DC surveyor and descendant of the Dogon tribe, to the nation’s capital. Pendleton’s monumental video commission for the Hirshhorn draws on images of Resurrection City, an encampment erected on the National Mall in the spring and summer of 1968.
To mark their respective spring moments, the two met to discuss the ways they pay tribute within their work, and what it looks like to bring something truly new to the table.
Adam Pendleton: This is kind of a full-circle moment for me—and as close as I’ve ever gotten to doing a major show in my hometown. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, so DC figured prominently in my imagination as a kind of cultural metropolis. The Hirshhorn would’ve been one of the first museums I went to growing up, where I had my first encounters with modern contemporary art.
Kwame Onwuachi: That’s really dope, man. I know how cool it is to have something in your own city, like Tatiana in New York is for me. My connection to DC stems from my grandfather, who taught anthropology and African American studies at Howard University in the ’60s and ’70s. When he came back to visit from Nigeria, he would stay in DC, so I spent my summers there throughout my childhood. When I got a chance to open up my first restaurant, it was offered to me in DC. Before that, I was a line cook making, what, $10 an hour? Then I got an opportunity to run my own restaurant and get a salary in DC. Now Dōgon is the sixth restaurant I’ve opened here.
Pendleton: Before this, I watched your Chef’s Table episode. You guys are so lucky. Artists don’t have anything like that—something that distills our biography and tells the audience who we are. It’s always so much more complicated for us. Sometimes you have this idea that everybody who’s successful has had this very easy path, but I feel a kinship with you because I think we’ve had trials and tribulations and moments of regression and rejection and used them as opportunities to move things forward. This is always happening for me, even in the daily process of working in the studio. Sometimes the work rejects me and I need to try to find my way back into it.
Onwuachi: I can totally relate to that. For me, it’s always about telling a story. If a dish tells a story, it has a soul. You’re not cooking for perfect seasoning; you’re cooking to share something with someone. That’s what resonates with me—figuring out how to use the dish to express something meaningful. It’s like, “What am I trying to say?” It’s also sustenance—people have to eat to survive. But if you are creating an experience like a restaurant, then you need to think on that next level of what you’re trying to convey. The message at Dōgon is: There would not be DC without West African science. The Dogon tribe, through its lineage, birthed Benjamin Banneker, who was a [freeman] that created the borders of DC by mapping the stars and constellations. The only reason he knew how to do that is because he was a descendant of the Dogon tribe—a tribe of scientists and astronomers. So that’s the story of Dōgon.
Pendleton: I’m not so much trying to tell a story because, for me, that suggests there’s some sort of traditional arc, like a beginning, middle, and end. But I am trying to create an experience. I’m investigating the power and potential of abstraction, and insisting on the right to exist within its possibilities. In that way, I’m kind of rejecting narrative and trying to move past it to be in this other space where things are more fluid. Sometimes I refer to it as a kind of “complex real,” where many things are happening at once. It’s anachronistic. It’s not the past, it’s not the present, it’s not the future—it’s about how we can experience the confluence of those temporal realities at any given moment.
Onwuachi: When you think about art, it’s something that adds meaning; it colors existence. It doesn’t sustain the body, but it can sustain the spirit. Food might start with sustenance, but it has the potential to transcend into an art form when you start layering in intention, creativity, and storytelling. It’s like building a house—you need a strong foundation before you can decorate or design it.
Pendleton: In my own work, there’s a necessity to create, but it’s not the same as the necessity to eat. Even if it’s not physically required, it contributes to the experience of being alive.
Onwuachi: Art is such a gift of life, even if it’s like drumming in class with a pencil or taking a crayon, and writing “Fuck my mom” on the wall. I don’t encourage any child to [say that to] their mom, but having that free will to express yourself is also a part of life.
Pendleton: I like this idea of a tribute. Tatiana’s named after your sister, right? I make these drawings every now and again; they’re called “Hey Mama Hey” and they’re a tribute to my mother, obviously. But I often think that these pursuits—we’re pursuing dreams here, right?—are always a tribute to someone. For me, it’s a tribute to my family, who allowed me to live a life [where I could] follow this path. But I do feel like there’s a certain kind of responsibility to a life that is led in pursuit of a dream.
Onwuachi: I don’t think it’s quantifiable by success, because I’ve met a lot of successful people that aren’t really happy. For me, the journey is the reward also. When I was coming up, the air smelled a little different, the mornings felt different, the late nights felt different because I was chasing a dream.
Pendleton: To forget the tribute and the possibility is an unhappy life.
Onwuachi: It’s easy to forget. It’s easy to get comfortable in whatever space you’re in … How do you feel about your Hirshhorn show?
Pendleton: I’m as ready as I’m going to be. This show’s focused on my contribution to contemporary painting, or more specifically contemporary American painting. I’m trying to make a kind of cultural, visual, and conceptual argument about the space I can occupy as a contemporary American painter. And really ask, What is painting? There’s been a kind of conservatism that’s emerged in the past 10 years or so [around] expectations for painting. I’m trying to free things up and attempt to do something radical and generous.
Onwuachi: I can’t wait to experience it, man.
