“I think about the studio first as a sanctuary, as a laboratory, as a library,” the painter Lindsay Adams says. “I’m here to create and release, but I’m also here to learn.” On an unseasonably cool September day, I find the 35-year-old perched studiously at the desk in the middle of her Chicago art studio, working away on her laptop, surrounded by the many worlds she’s created through her works since she burst onto the art scene in 2022 with her debut solo exhibition Two Things Can Be True at Eaton DC. The presentation featured her quiet and reflective portrait of Black women figures, still life, and floral oil paintings, establishing her singular voice as a painter. “I also think of the studio as a classroom and a study,” she adds of her practice. “Twenty minutes or 20 hours can both be equally important amounts of time in the space.”
Lindsay Adams, Solar Searching, 2025
In the light-filled studio, Adams’s gestural strokes leap off of canvases featuring juicy golden yellows, and sumptuous reds. There are also greyscale drawings and works on paper with charcoal etchings that mimic the frenetic energy of improvisational jazz. This year, the artist became co-represented by Sean Kelly Gallery in Los Angeles and PATRON in Chicago. Her show Keep Your Wonder Moving at Sean Kelly ran from January 18 though March 8, 2025 and marked her West Coast debut, as well as her inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. Widely praised, the show of 11 paintings epitomized Adams’ interrogation of abstraction in relation to imagination and personhood. Adams, who is currently a graduate student at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, says she wasn’t surprised by the fact that she evolved from representational to abstraction styles. “The thesis of my work has remained exactly the same,” she says. It has always been about her deep connection to understanding notions of space and freedom.
On October 28, 2025, Adams will mount her first institutional solo show at the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. Ceremony, curated by Claudia M. Watts, features several of the artist’s paintings and works on paper. Those pieces will be presented alongside more than a dozen archival objects that contextualize threads of Black migration and mobility that emerge from Adams’s work. The inclusion of ephemeral material from both historical figures and undetermined individuals speaks to a crucial function of her practice: underscoring the interconnectedness of Black artistic and literary production, and liberation struggles. This dialogue with the archive is evident in the naming and conceptualization of much of Adams’s work, including her recent show all water has a perfect memory at PATRON. The title of the exhibition, which ran from April 10 through June 14, 2025, culled inspiration from Toni Morrison’s essay “The Site of Memory.”
But that’s not the only major project she’s got on the horizon. In April 2025, Adams was commissioned to create a site-specific work to be installed at the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center in Chicago’s historic South Side neighborhood, joining a chorus of artists developing original works for the campus which will open to the public in 2026. Weary Blues, named after the famed Langston Hughes poem, exemplifies Adams’s commitment to working intentionally in a lineage of Black writers, scholars, and musicians.
“All of [my] work is not about joy. It’s about existing…and existing goes past that,” she says. “It comes with nuance and layers. Of course, there are moments of hope and transcendence, but there are also more sorrowful moments. This painting exists at the nexus of both.”
The artwork—which will be translated from a 24 x 24-inch painting originally created in 2024 into silkscreen panels on fabric—is a stunning encapsulation of somberness that still manages to put forth gentle bright spots. In addition to the honor she feels contributing an installation to the Center, the artist expressed gratitude that the work will live in a place where people can come visit and spend time with it.
The figures and floral-scapes Adams painted in years past, and certainly the abstractions she’s working on now, all stem from her persisting meditation on place and its connection to liberation. This prominent line of inquiry within Adams’ paintings is informed equally by her background in foreign relations, sociology, and cultural anthropology, as well as growing up in historic areas throughout Washington D.C. and Maryland. “I was always wanting to know what happened in a place. To know what existed, who existed. I always had a sense of presence,” she says. Adams received her Bachelor’s degree in International Studies and Spanish/LAIS (Latin and Iberian Studies) in 2012 from the University of Richmond in Virginia before later pursuing her Master’s degree at SAIC, where she will graduate in 2025. She received the New Artist Society Merit Award in 2023, and became a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Award in 2024.
For Adams, the key to growth as an artist, scholar, and human is remembering that “legacy is impactful no matter the scale. The work is not just going to exist at the top of the monument. There’s being a monument and then there’s a movement.” Adams possesses an unwavering capacity to start conversation between constraint and possibility, dreaming and reality, and the seen and unseen. Her vision continues to make new meaning around what it means to exist limitlessly.
Adams with two works in progress
