Adam Pendleton shares his personal guide to Amsterdam, including a destination for coffee obsessives, a beloved bookstore, and an art-filled hotel.

Brooklyn-based artist Adam Pendleton works across painting, collage, film, performance, and publishing, using language and abstract form to probe Black history and the avant-garde. His work is in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Studio Museum of Harlem.

This fall, Amsterdam is getting a double dose of Pendleton. The Stedelijk Museum will present Adam Pendleton: Some Wild Kind of Language, his first museum exhibition in the Netherlands, while Eenwerk gallery will stage his solo show The Compositional Logic of We.

Preparing the two exhibitions has given Pendleton time to find his rhythm in the city—and assemble his own map of favorite restaurants, cafés, shops, and neighborhood spots. “You can cross Amsterdam quite easily, stop for coffee, see an exhibition, walk along the waterfront, and still have the feeling that the day belongs to you,” he says. Here are some of his favorite spots in Amsterdam.

Where to ShopThe Bird Tsang

At this ceramics studio known for its sculptural stoneware and brightly colored glazes, the founders work directly with chefs and cooks to develop handmade tableware suited to a restaurant or client’s food and broader identity, from the ingredients used to the lighting and interiors. Pendleton is drawn to the way these objects exist somewhere between sculpture and utility. “A plate changes once something is placed on it,” he says. “I like that instability and the idea that an object is completed by what happens to it.”

BLACK Comme des Garçons

In the Zeedijk district, Rei Kawakubo’s diffusion-line boutique is compact, severe, and instantly recognizable, turning a shopping stop into a full expression of the designer’s world. “Rei Kawakubo has spent decades demonstrating that clothes can alter your understanding of the body, but I’m equally interested in the worlds she builds around them,” Pendleton says.

Architectura & Natura

Shelves at this nine-decade-old bookstore on the Leliegracht canal are devoted to architecture, urbanism, gardens, landscape, and the natural world—an unusually broad remit that rewards browsing. “I almost never leave this place with the book I imagined I was looking for,” Pendleton says. “That is exactly why I like it. A photograph leads to a building, a building to a garden, a garden to a way of thinking. The best bookstores reorganize your curiosities.”

Robstolk

This specialist printing house turns artists’ and designers’ ideas into books, packaging, and other custom projects. “I love printers because they know things artists and designers often don’t,” Pendleton says. “At Robstolk, an idea has to pass through ink, paper, pressure, registration, machinery—all the physical facts that make an image real. I still find that translation fascinating. Printing can reveal something that you didn’t know was there.”

Where to Eat and DrinkBAK

In the waterfront neighborhood of Houthavens, this veggie-forward restaurant sources its seasonal ingredients and produce from Dutch farmers, hunters, and fishermen. Its style comes through in dishes such as venison fillet with tart rhubarb and beetroot sauce.  “The food here is precise, but it doesn’t arrive at the table trying to demonstrate how much work went into it. You’re eating something that belongs very specifically to both a time and place, so the simplicity doesn’t feel like a cumbersome performance.”

Levain et le Vin

A sourdough bakery and natural-wine shop founded by Florence Gramende, this neighborhood staple sells naturally leavened loaves and pastries alongside sandwiches, coffee, and pantry goods. “This is one of those places I wish were in my own neighborhood,” Pendleton says. “What I really like is the lack of hierarchy between the exceptional and the everyday: a beautiful loaf of bread, good butter, eggs, wine. Everything here feels chosen with care.”

DAK Coffee Roasters

Founded by two Montreal natives, this roastery favors traceable beans, experimental processing methods, and bright, distinctive flavors. “I’m serious about coffee,” says Pendleton. “Whenever I travel, finding a good local roaster is one of the first things I do.” That ritual grew into a collaboration: he designed a special-edition coffee box based on his Basis drawings, eight monumental examples of which will encircle the Stedelijk’s grand staircase in his forthcoming exhibition. “What interested me was not only the quality of the coffee but the intelligence of the entire project,” he says. “They think about flavor, design, language, packaging—all the different ways you encounter something before and after you taste it.”

Sense of Place

A changing coffee menu shares billing with a carefully programmed soundtrack at this highly curated cafe. On Sunday mornings, a multicourse coffee omakase is on offer (reservations required).  “When I travel, I’m not really looking for an escape. I’m looking for a heightened awareness of where I am,” Pendleton says. “You slow down, have a very good coffee, and notice things. That seems simple, but it isn’t.”

Where to StayPillows Grand Boutique Hotel Maurits at the Park

Set in a restored 1908 university building on Oosterpark, this 88-room hotel retains original architectural details while adding serene, art-filled rooms, a guest-only Living Room, a rooftop bar overlooking the trees, and an urban spa. It was awarded Two MICHELIN Keys in 2025. “I like hotels that understand hospitality as a form of discretion,” says Pendleton. The park also makes an easy starting point for long walks: “I put on music and follow whatever catches my eye, whether it’s graffiti, a building, somebody’s garden, a bookstore, or the way two colors sit next to each other on a storefront.”

Adam Pendleton: Some Wild Kind of Language opens October 10 and runs through January 17 at the Stedelijk Museum, bringing together eleven paintings and eight large-scale drawings.

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