Alice Adams (artist)

Alice Adams (born November 16, 1930) is an American artist known for her sculpture and site-specific land art in the 1970s and for her major public art projects in transit systems, airports, university campuses and other urban sites throughout the United States since 1986. Her earlier work in tapestry and woven forms was important in the American fiber art movement.

Biography

Adams grew up in Jamaica, New York and in 1953 graduated with a BFA in painting from Columbia University. Following graduation, she went to Aubusson, France to study tapestry weaving and design at L'Ecole Nationale d'Art Decoratif. Except for two years spent in France, Adams has lived in New York City, traveling for collaboration and consultation on public art projects in the United States and abroad. There have been several stages in her eclectic career.

Career

Tapestries and woven forms

After completing her studies in Aubusson, Adams returned to New York in 1956. She brought a tapestry loom from Aubusson to weave her own designs, but her practice began to depart from traditional tapestry technique. Working on what conventionally had been the back of the tapestry, she developed surface articulation and added materials like rope, sisal twine, and found objects to the traditional wool and cotton surface. She and other innovators, like Lenore Tawney, Claire Zeisler and Sheila Hicks, moved weaving off the loom and into the realm of three-dimensional form. Her work was part of the influential "Woven Forms" exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in 1963.

In 1963 Adams began using tarred rope, chain link fence and steel cable in sculptures that preceded the use of such materials by other artists. She discovered various knotting, looped structures used in sailor's knots and techniques for covering ship's railings, but enlarged the scale and the materials traditionally used. In 1966, Lucy Lippard included three examples of this work in "Eccentric Abstraction," the exhibition she curated at the Fischbach Gallery in New York City. The sculpture in this exhibition ran counter to the minimal "primary structures" of Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt, suggesting more intuitive and idiosyncratic approaches. The show included Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, Frank Viner, Donald Potts, and Gary Kuehn, most of whom were showing in New York for the first time.

Sculpture

Adams' sculptures after 1968 explored the architectural elements of the wall, the corner, the column and the vault. Continuing the use of flexible materials, she painted layers of latex on the old plaster walls of her studio, stripped them off, and then mounted the casts on two-by-four frameworks leaning against the wall. She saw her practice as a way of drawing people into spaces that are initially familiar but that later appear new. She used familiar building materials like wood lath, covering or partially covering frameworks to create free-standing partitions, columns and vaults. This work was shown at the 55 Mercer Gallery and in the Whitney Museum Annuals in 1969 and 1971.

After doing her first outdoor work in 1977 using traditional barn framing techniques, she began to work with large wooden slabs and timbers and laminated wood arches to make sculptures that, though not precisely architectural fragments, suggested larger structures. "...Adams' pieces always hint at something larger. Doorways hint at the wider world, and personal memories grow into collective memories about built places." This architecture related sculpture was shown in 1979 and 1981 at the Hal Bromm Gallery in New York, and in 1984 was part of "An International survey of Painting and Sculpture" at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Earthworks and site sculpture

Adams' site-specific sculptures of the 1970s provide a link to her later and most recent public art. Several of these employed heavy earth moving equipment and "Shorings" (1978) at the Artpark, Lewiston, New York; "Mound for Viewing Slope and Sky" (1981) at Princeton University; and "Vertical Up for OOIC" (1983) in Omaha, Nebraska; depended upon the shape, weight and placement of the earth. In other works like "Leveling" (1977) and "Three Structures on a Slope" (1978), the structure measured the elevation of the ground on which it stood and earlier references to architecture developed into actual architectural exercises. The "Adams' House" (1977) and the "Lost House" (1979) of this time used the structure and vision of the house as containers of collective and individual memory. The work of women whose work related to the 1970s was organized into the exhibition "Decoys, Complexes and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s" in 2008 at the Sculpture Center in NYC and included Adams, Mary Miss, Nancy Holt, Jackie Ferrara, Alice Aycock, Agnes Denes, Michelle Stuart, Suzanne Harris and Lynda Benglis.

Public art

Adams' site sculptures of the 1970s at venues like the Artpark and the Nassau County Museum of Art were commissioned and funded but, like many similar projects, temporary. Her first permanent public commission, "Small Park with Arches", was fabricated in her studio and installed at the Toledo Botanical Garden in 1984. This work used the vocabulary of wooden beams and laminated arches, and continued a characteristic direction of her earlier work; the creation of places to be inhabited.

In the following years she often introduced new materials and forms into her projects. While Adams employed boat builder

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