Pat Adams

Pat Adams (born July 8, 1928) is an American modernist painter and mixed-media artist. She is a member of the National Academy of Design.

Biography Adams was born in Stockton, California. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1949, after which she took courses at the California College of Arts and Crafts, University of the Pacific and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1950 she moved to New York City and enrolled in the art program at the Brooklyn Museum Art School where she studied under Max Beckmann, John Ferren and Reuben Tam.

In 1956 she won a Fulbright scholarship to study in France, where she traveled with her husband, Vincent Longo, who is also a painter and printmaker. Adams taught at Bennington College from 1964 to 1993, and was appointed Visiting Professor of Art to Yale University's Master of Fine Arts program from 1990 to 1994.

Style Her style, a mixture of modernism and abstraction, is described by Adams as "yield[ing] more to qualities than ideas, more to matter than its naming". She continues, "...I sense a release of potentiality, a release of more than we know....I conclude that of whatever else the artist's effort may consist, it abounds in restless projective extension; innately it bounds toward the vision of an anticipatory not-as-yet."

Exhibitions Adams's first solo exhibition was in 1954 at the Korman Gallery, later renamed the Zabriskie Gallery, under the ownership of Virginia Zabriskie. Adams work was later characterized as "suggest[ing] a desire to assert the tangible actuality of what appears before the eye".

In 1960, Dore Ashton asserted that Pat Adams's works detail her "visual experiences of nature and her spiritual insights about the cosmos". Ashton places Adams in the same category as artists like Odilon Redon and Mark Tobey, in that they each "seek to find what is 'within' the inmost secrets of the universe". Kramer also notes that her "paintings fill the eye with an almost hypnotic bath of completely delightful visual detail".

Publications "Remarks on Their Medium by Four Painters" in Artforum, 1975 "On Working" in Quadrille, Fall 1977 Interview with Robert Boyers in Bennington Review, 1977 "Subject and Being" in Art Journal, Spring, 1982