Biography from AskART:
| Interested in sacred and prehistoric art, abstract painter Patricia Adams has traveled widely in pursuit of such studies to Burma, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Indonesia, Thailand and Malta. Since 1964, Adams has taught painting in Vermont at Bennington College, and at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1971-1972, 1983, and from 1990 on. Her primary home has been Bennington, Vermont.
She has served as visiting artist and critic and taught seminars at the graduate level at Queens College, New York City, in 1972; University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1976; the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, both in 1978; Columbia University, New York City, 1979; Kent State University, Ohio, and Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, both in 1980 (as well as the latter institution in 1981 and 1989); Mills College, Oakland, California, 1987; and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1989.
Patricia Adams was born in 1928 in Stockton, California, gaining her B.A. degree in 1948 from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied with Margaret Peterson O'Hagan, Worth Ryder and Erle Loran. Her teachers were influenced by the ideas of Hans Hofmann, Paul Cezanne and collector Albert Barnes, as well as the sacred art of Northwestern India, thus laying the ground work for Adam's later pursuits.
Adams also studied in 1950 at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York with well-known artists Max Beckmann, John Ferren and Ruben Tam.
Adams became known as a lyrical watercolorist. She is also known for her small gouaches in which she often combines a great variety of mediums; also combinations of methods. She uses these with precise patterns in geometric shapes. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, American Federation of the Arts and many galleries.
Adams' works can be read as an argument for the continuing vitality of basic abstract forms. Yet her densely crowded surfaces remind us that this kind of abstraction does not necessarily mean reduction, Complex and rich, these works affirm the expressive potential of the nonrepresentational impulse.
Awards received by the artist include a Fullbright Fellowship in 1956-1957 to study neo-lithic megaliths in Ireland and Brittany. Adams also received a grant from the National Council on the Arts in 1968; National Endowment for the Arts in 1976 and 1987; the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980, 1984, 1986 and 1989. Her vast teaching experience was acknowledged by the College Art Association in 1984 with their Distinguished Teaching Award.
She also was awarded residencies at the Yaddo and MacDowell art colonies, subsequently becoming a member of the former institution in 1972, and an important figure there as vice-chairman and member of the Board of Trustees and Executive Council. She was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1992 and a National Academician in 1993.
Adams first exhibited in New York City in 1953-1954 at the Zabriskie Gallery (then the Korman Gallery), where she has continued to show every other year since that time. Other exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; New York Academy of Sciences, New York City; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore; Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts; and Brattleboro Museum, Vermont.
Patricia Adams work may be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of
American Art; University of California, Berkeley; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; University of North Carolina, Greensboro; and the Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield.
Source:
Jules and Nancy Heller, North American Women Artists of the 20th Century
Additional information courtesy of Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
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