instagram: @laurenfrancesadams
Lauren Frances Adams was born on a pig farm in Snow Hill, North Carolina in 1979. Her work has been exhibited widely in artist-run spaces, historic houses, university galleries, museums, and public spaces. She graduated with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she trained in mural painting. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Masters of Fine Arts degree in 2007.
Adams has exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Warhol Museum, Nymans House National Trust in England, Royal NoneSuch Gallery, The Mattress Factory, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Smack Mellon, and CUE Art Foundation.
She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has held residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, La Cité internationale des Arts in Paris, France, Sacatar Foundation in Bahia, Brazil, and Back Lane West in Cornwall.
She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award (2007). Recent awards include the Trawick Prize (2016) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016).
In 2013, with several other artists from around the country, Lauren co-founded Ortega Y Gasset Projects in Queens. OyG Projects is a non-profit curatorial collective, now located in Brooklyn. Her most recent exhibition organizing resulted in the 2020 group exhibition Rights and Wrongs, hosted by The Peale at the Carroll in Baltimore, Maryland.
Her most recent collaborative public art project, Centennial of the Everyday with Stewart Watson at Gadsby’s Tavern Museum in Alexandria, Virginia, won an Americans for the Arts Public Art Network Year in Review award (2018).
Adams teaches full-time at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. She has been a visiting artist and critic at Valand Academy in Sweden, Funen Academy in Denmark, and at universities, colleges and museums throughout the United States. In 2020, she was awarded the Trustees’ Award for Excellence in Teaching at MICA.
Lauren’s artwork primarily features painting, drawing, printmaking, and sometimes video and performance in the context of installation works. Her interests include political propaganda, the history of decorative arts, and labor movements.
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