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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Pat Adams: Work from the 1970s and 80s

Mar 5 – Apr 16, 2022
291 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002, United States

“I see parallels between her work and a consistent transcendental strand in modernism leading from Paul Klee through Joseph Beuys to Anselm Kiefer,” said the scholar and museum director Robert Wolterstorff of the artist Pat Adams, in 2017, “both an acute sensitivity to material and fracture and a deep sense of meaning and allusion.” Adams was born in Stockton, California, in 1928. After college in her home state, she moved around, studying art in Chicago, in Brooklyn, winning a Fulbright to France, and then heading to Bennington College, in Vermont, where she would teach and paint for a good 30 years, and where she still lives and paints. Her work is abstract—curves, dapples, skeins, mists, the known and the unknown meeting mysteriously. The late critic Hilton Kramer marveled at “the most delicate, painstaking, exquisite images.” And oh the inner life of the colors. This is a don’t-miss show! —Laura Jacobs

Pat Adams, “Cardinal,” 1978.