Lecture: "Adam Pendleton: Here Is Your Language"

Adrienne Edwards is Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Previously, she served as Curator of Performa in New York City and as Curator-at-Large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In addition to nearly fifty interdisciplinary performance commissions, Edwards’s curatorial projects have included Blackness in Abstraction at Pace Gallery, New York (2016); the travelling exhibition and catalogue Jason Moran at Walker Art Center, ICA Boston, and Wexner Center for the Arts (2018–19); ASSEMBLY for Frieze New York’s Live Program and the Artist Award (2018); Moved by the Motion’s Sudden Rise at the Whitney (2020); Dave McKenzie’s solo exhibition The Story I Tell Myself and performance commission Disturbing the View at the Whitney (2021); My Barbarian’s twentieth-anniversary exhibition, performances, and catalogue at the Whitney and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021–22); Quiet as It’s Kept: 2022 Whitney Biennial (2022); Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side (2023), a four-part suite of performances and photography, video installation, and catalogue. She was part of the Whitney’s core team for David Hammons’s public art monument Day’s End. She has taught art history and visual studies at New York University, the New School, and The Graduate Center at CUNY. She is a frequent contributor to a range of artist monographs, anthologies, exhibition catalogues, and academic journals. Edwards was President of the Jury for the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022. She holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University.