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Lauren Frances Adams is an artist from North Carolina who currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland.   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.

Her work has been shown at the Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), the North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh), Royal NoneSuch (Oakland, CA), and at Conner Contemporary in Washington, DC.  Notable exhibitions include installations at the CUE Art Foundation in Chelsea, New York, and at Nymans House National Trust in Sussex, England.     
She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA grant, and a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In the summer of 2010 she held a residency at the Cite International in Paris, France, studying French textiles and ornamental decoration.   Recent shows include solo projects in St. Louis (at the Luminary Center for the Arts), and the group exhibition Out of Fashion at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, NC. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo project at the Contemporary Arts Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, and a solo project in Cornwall, Great Britain in 2012.

Lauren is a full-time faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and was an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri from 2008 - 2012.

CONTACT: laurenfrancesadams [at] gmail . com

You can view a sample of Lauren's work archive above by clicking on individual images.