Lisa Adams

Combining images of dystopic environments and unlikely human-built structures, Lisa Adams is best known for her oil paintings of imaginary worlds that address both personal and collective realities. Though her work is not directly about issues resulting from climate change or ecological disaster, her paintings reference a significant shift in our thinking and our planet.

Lisa Adams' work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles, where her 2013 solo exhibition Second Life was reviewed in the LA Times by Holly Myers. Her most recent exhibition America The Beautiful ran from September 12 - October 31, 2015 and her upcoming exhibition at CB1 Gallery is slated for January, 2016.

Lisa also blogs on Los Angeles art for the Huffington Post.

Adams knew she would be an artist at age ten after seeing a reproduction of Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory. She also recalls being fascinated by the Charles and Ray Eames short film Powers of Ten and by a Karl Benjamin non-objective painting when she was thirteen years old.

In 1981, shortly after graduating from the Claremont Graduate University, Adams and artist Craig Kauffman (with whom she was romantically involved at the time) moved to SoHo in New York City. She often referred to that time as her real education, where she was influenced by artists such as Susan Rothenberg and Julian Schnabel. Adams' work was included in group exhibitions in the East Village and SoHo.

In 1985 after her split with Kauffman, she returned to Los Angeles and continued to pursue her career as a painter. Adams painted abstractly for over a decade, eventually experimenting with unconventional art materials, such as linoleum and caulking and she learned how to weld and woodwork, incorporating steel and shaped panels as elements integral to her paintings. She thought of her investigations into this hybrid form of artwork as “wall dependent” sculpture. Later in the early 2000s Adams received a Durfee ARC Grant to purse experiments in video work.

In addition to her studio practice Adams works on public art projects which have included the West Valley Branch Library, Reseda, California, the Fire Station No. 64 in Watts, Los Angeles and her most recent public art project is the Chatsworth Station for the Los Angeles Metro Orange Line Extension completed in June 2012.

As an artist-in-residence, Adams has lived and worked in Slovenia, Finland, Japan, the Netherlands and Costa Rica and has traveled extensively throughout Europe and Asia.

She has worked as an independent curator, who in 2000, co-founded Crazy Space, an alternative exhibition space, in Santa Monica, California.

In the 1990s Adams was commission by BMW of North America to paint an ArtCar and has been included in A Day in the Life of the American Woman: How We See Ourselves, Bullfinch Press, 2005.

Adams began teaching in 1986. Since that time she has taught at many reputed art departments throughout the Los Angeles area and abroad, including the University of Southern California, the Claremont Graduate University the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Ljubljana, Slovenia, UCLA Extension, Otis College of Art & Design and the Santa Monica College of Design, Art and Architecture where she authored a book titled FM*, (Peeps Island Press, 1999) a How To book about painting, based on her teachings between 1997-1999. She has also conducted workshops at the World Design Studios in Gifu City, Japan, the Idyllwild Arts Academy and Summer Arts at California State University, Fresno.

Filmmaker Juri Koll directed and produced a 54-minute documentary on Adams titled Lisa Adams: As It Appears To Bewhich made its debut at the Crest Theater in Westwood (Los Angeles) on June 6, 2014. In 2012 two short films were produced about Adams and her working process. The first is by Eric Minh Swenson titled Toxic Sky and the second is part of a video series by Joseph Santarromana titled The Remembers, episode 3.

In the fall of 2011, her first monograph book titled Vicissitude of Circumstance was published by Zero+ Publishing (available on Amazon) and James Scarborough's essay that appears in the book was published on the Huffington Post.

Lisa Adams work is in the public collections of Eli Broad, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Frederick R. Weisman Museum, the Laguna Museum of Art and the Edward Albee Foundation.