Lauren Frances Adams was born in Snow Hill, North Carolina in 1979. She graduated with a Bachelor's of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and with a Masters of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University.

Adams has exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh), the Mint Museum of Craft and Design (Charlotte, NC), the Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), an ex-Turkish bathhouse in Belgrade, Serbia, Fraction Workspace (Chicago, IL), Royal NoneSuch Gallery (Oakland, CA), The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA) and CUE Art Foundation (New York). She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, held a residency at Jentel in Wyoming, and recently completed a residency at the Cite in Paris, France, July and August 2010. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award.

Current projects involve Elizabethan colonialism, Croatoan indians, and the legend of the Lost Colony. This recent work has been exhibited at the Luminary Center for the Arts (St. Louis, MO), Conner Contemporary (Washington, DC), the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts (North Carolina), and upcoming projects in the UK in 2012.

She has collaborated on a number of projects involving painting, performance, video, sculpture and camera obscuras. Sweet Jesus was recently executed at the Historic Lemp Brewery in St. Louis, Missouri, a collaborative curatorial effort involving a one-weekend happening. Adams recently began working with Temporary Art Review, a platform for contemporary art criticism that focuses on alternative spaces and critical exchange among disparate art communities. House Coat, a project conceived by Elizaveta Meksin in fabricated textiles, was collaboratively installed in 2011 on the exterior of Adams' house in St. Louis, MO.

A recent publication with Allison Smith, entitled Needle Work, resulted from curating an exhibition of Smith's work at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. The catalogue is distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

Lauren's artwork primarily features painting, drawing, printmaking, digital manipulation and sometimes video and performance in the context of installation works.   Her interests include political propaganda, the history of decorative arts, and the work of the Russian Revolutionary artists of the early 20th century. Adams’ work is inspired by topical issues, especially relating to agriculture, labor, the American military, colonialism and capitalism. Her work visualizes social and political hierarchies, with a goal to disarm the viewer and reveal unexpected associations and collusions. Adams achieve this via research into historical decorative forms, appropriating from diverse fields, such as French toile and Soviet avant-garde ‘agit-porcelain.’ The artist employs subversive tension between domestic decoration and topical propaganda. Humor is an important element in her practice, seeking to highlight historical and contemporary discrepancies, using culture against itself through ornamental appropriation. The materials are typically ephemeral, or utilize the prototype as a way to comment upon capitalist culture.

Adams currently teaches in the BFA program and the interdisciplinary MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis.

To find out more about current and past exhibitions, please click on "news".

You may contact Lauren through email:
lauren frances adams (at) gmail (dot) com