“What does it mean to exist beyond containment?” artist Lindsay Adams wondered aloud while standing in her temporary studio at Silver Art Projects on the 28th floor of 4 World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. “I’ve tried to let my work do that.”
It was the last day of her yearlong New York residency, and Adams was surrounded by her books, paints, papers, and more than a dozen paintings in various states of completion. Soon, Adams and her husband would pack everything up before heading home to Chicago.
“I’m at this beautiful in-between moment,” said Adams. For the past few years, the artist, who is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery and PATRON Gallery, has been exploring a painterly language that contains both hints of figuration and pure gestural abstraction.
SOIL (Virginia Red Clay), 2026
Lindsay Adams
Sean Kelly Gallery
Last year, she opened her first institutional solo exhibition, “Ceremony,” at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. Earlier this spring, she opened “SOIL,” her New York solo debut at Sean Kelly Gallery, a follow-up to “Keep Your Wonder Moving,” her 2025 debut with the gallery in Los Angeles.
In “SOIL,” Adams made the philosophical and compositional decision to paint all of her works on a ground of Lamp Black pigment, an intense noir hue. Rather than wholly painting over the ground, Adams allowed flickers of this black wash to rise to the surface, creating the effect of fertile ground from which her bursts of pinks, blues, and greens emerge.
“It evolved into thinking about this black ground as a place of regeneration and of this unearthing of life,” she said.
The centerpiece of that show, SOIL (Virginia Red Clay) (2026), is a monumental diptych measuring 7 feet high and 12 feet wide, marked by almost tidal sweeps of bright pinks, blood reds, and deep browns.
Now, Adams is among 25 artists who will debut commissioned artwork for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, which opens this week. For the Center, Adams translated her 2024 oil painting Weary Blues, a brooding abstraction named after a famed Langston Hughes poem, into a series of screen panels installed in the café.
“Weary Blues visually embodies my practice over the past six years or so,” said Adams. “It exists at this nexus of the representational floral and the abstract. The blues and the color in the work are so profound, and I thought that it would offer this space a sense of color and memory.”
The setting seems a fitting one for Adams’s work, which grapples with the beauty and cruelty of history as well as what it means to belong to a place. The artist was born in Washington, D.C., and earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Richmond in international studies, focusing on world politics and diplomacy. These social-science and anthropological interests have shaped her approach to painting, and the artist maintains an active writing practice as well.
“Having a professional career before graduate school gave me a different level of rigor in terms of how I looked at my practice and how I looked at where I wanted the legacy of my art to be,” said Adams, who earned an MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025.
“In my graduate thesis, I wrote about belonging,” she explained. “I posit that belonging is not rooted in geographical permanence but in this ephemeral core that changes and shifts.”
Adams’s evolving understanding of belonging and world-building is rooted in the Black American experience. Her research has explored various safe havens of Black leisure—those listed in the Green Book, an annual travel guide published from 1936 to 1966 by Victor H. Green that helped Black Americans navigate Jim Crow America, as well as historic African American beaches that existed along the East Coast and in the South.
In her Silver Art Projects studio, photographs of James Baldwin and Josephine Baker are pinned to the walls. Adams noted that these Black artists, among others at that time, often moved abroad for the creative freedom they were denied in the U.S. “[They] moved to Paris. We can’t excuse systemic terrors, but people were creative,” Adams said of these artists’ adaptability.
Dorothy Marie’s Pumpkin Bars, 2026
Lindsay Adams
Sean Kelly Gallery
Carrie Blue, 2026
Lindsay Adams
Sean Kelly Gallery
Adams thinks her global mindset comes from being raised in Washington, D.C. “It was this very beautiful place of cultural production and creativity and history,” she said. “I always had this draw to history. I wanted to know and understand the world beyond what was directly in front of me.”
Her desire to make art rooted in liberation and limitlessness has informed her compositions in very specific ways through color, form, and installation.
sunset sounds and waves that glow, 2026
Lindsay Adams
Sean Kelly Gallery
She often paints tondos, circular works of art popular in the Renaissance, and installs her works in multipiece arrangements that range from minimalist, plinth-like lines of 12-by-12-inch paintings to spread-out, almost musical arrangements.
“I’ve read a lot of Black feminist theories about refusal and placemaking,” Adams said. “When I really think about tools of refusal, I think about the scale and the compositions of my work as well. The tondos have no edge, you know, so it’s very disruptive in a sense, even though they have been an active part of the history of painting. To look at tondos from a lens of abstraction can be a little disorienting.”
For Adams, her paintings are a negotiation of the world around her. Though she knows her keen sense of color may pull viewers in, she hopes they engage in a deeper conversation with the work as well. “My world has expanded, both theoretically and formally, over time. I’ve tapped into this freedom of mark and color that had been revealing itself, but I really kind of just let myself go and lean into it,” she said.
She says these choices turn painting on its head: “I know the legacy of painting. I know the history of painting. Let’s get wild with it,” she said.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/r7Id9cS
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