LINDSAY ADAMS

Early Years

Born in Washington, D.C., Adams grew up in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Her upbringing in the DMV area, alongside her lived experience as a Black woman with cerebral palsy, informs her nuanced approach to art and self-representation. Adams holds a BA in International Studies and Spanish from the University of Richmond and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Chicago.

Lindsay Adams Artworks

Adams’s art practice is rooted in painting and drawing, using both abstract and figurative forms to examine themes of liberation, memory, and the construction of imagined worlds. Her works are known for their rhythmic brushwork, chromatic layering, and the interplay between intention and discovery. Adams often draws on literature and music—such as Langston Hughes’s poetry and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time—to build visual spaces that reflect both personal and collective histories.

Abstraction and Memory

Adams’s early works were grounded in figuration, depicting floral motifs and Black subjects as portals into selfhood and shared experience. Over time, her practice has shifted toward abstraction, a transition she describes as ‘an inevitable shift toward expressing a conceptual story, allowing myself latitude in my storytelling and cultural reflection’.

A significant influence on Adams’s approach to painting and process is Howardena Pindell, whose pioneering use of abstraction, layering, and unconventional materials has had a profound impact on generations of artists. Like Pindell, Adams is interested in the metaphorical processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, using repeated gestures and textured surfaces to evoke memory, healing, and self-discovery.

Pindell’s commitment to addressing issues of race, trauma, and autobiography through abstraction resonates in Adams’s own work, which often explores the complexities of Black womanhood and the everyday.

In exhibitions such as Keep Your Wonder Moving (Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, 2025) and All water has a perfect memory (PATRON, Chicago, 2025), Adams constructs layered surfaces by building up, washing away, and manipulating paint, creating a sense of flux and ambiguity that invites sustained contemplation.

Select Public Commissions, Awards and Accolades

• Weary Blues, Obama Presidential Center, Chicago (2025)
• Helen Frankenthaler Award (2024)
• New Artist Society Merit Award, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2023)

Exhibitions

Lindsay Adams has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important galleries and institutions. Below is a selection.

Solo Exhibitions

• Keep Your Wonder Moving, Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles (2025)
• All water has a perfect memory, PATRON, Chicago (2025)
• Two Things Can Be True, Eaton DC, Washington, D.C. (2022)
• ...And Ain’t I A Woman., Riverhill Art Residency, Upstate Art Weekend, Ulster Park, NY (2022)

Group Exhibitions

• How Do We Know the World?, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2023)
• All Together, Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C. (2022)
• The Sanctuary, West Chelsea Contemporary, New York (2022)
• It Never Entered My Mind, Sean Kelly, Los Angeles (2024)
• Arcadia and Elsewhere, James Cohan Gallery, New York (2024)
• In the Know, Show, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2024).

Lindsay Adams FAQs

Ocula | 2025