Lauren Frances Adams (b. 1979, Snow Hill, North Carolina) is a painter and installation artist whose work engages political histories and the decorative arts. Plumbing the surface designs of domestic interiors from ancient Rome to the American White House, her work speaks to the ways that race and identity are woven into power systems and material culture.
Often working with images and materials culled from different registers, such as found everyday objects and archival collections held at historic sites, Adams’ works reflect her experience growing up on a rural farm in the American South, and are inspired by the need for reckoning with the past in order to understand the present.
Adams earned a BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she trained in mural painting, and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007.
Her work has been widely exhibited in artist-run spaces, historic homes, university galleries, museums, and public spaces. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Winterthur Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, Andy Warhol Museum, Nymans House (National Trust, England), Mattress Factory, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and CUE Art Foundation.
She has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans), La Cité internationale des Arts (Paris), Sacatar Foundation (Bahia, Brazil), and Back Lane West (Cornwall, UK).
Adams has received several prestigious awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award (2007), the Trawick Prize (2016), and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016).
In 2013, she co-founded Ortega Y Gasset Projects (OyG), a non-profit curatorial collective now located in Brooklyn. Her recent curatorial work includes the 2020 group exhibition Rights and Wrongs at The Peale at the Carroll Mansion in Baltimore, Maryland.
Her collaborative public art project, Centennial of the Everyday, with Stewart Watson, was installed at Gadsby’s Tavern Museum in Alexandria, Virginia, and received an Americans for the Arts Public Art Network Year in Review Award in 2018.
Adams is a full-time faculty member at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she was honored with the Trustees’ Award for Excellence in Teaching (2020). She has been a visiting artist and critic at various institutions and organizations across the United States.
In 2025, she is an artist in residence at the Jane Austen Collection at Goucher College, working on a collaborative project with historian Dr. Victoria Rose Pass, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth.
For updates on exhibitions and projects, please visit NEWS.
instagram: @laurenfrancesadams