Jamie Adams

JAMIE ADAMS

Jamie Adams is an American figurative painter working in the vein of personal memoir. He creates fictional narratives as mnemonic markers, exploring the psyche through personal events, dreams, and cultural myth. His painted characters are rather like portrait projections, assembled from an eclectic range of visual sources, including mid-century cinematic and TV culture to old-world paintings, film stills and vintage photos, AI, and clay sculpture.

Adams takes vicarious pleasure from playfully decorating these characters with theatrical flair and a kind of wishful thinking, bestowing them with sometimes enlarged coiffures, pointy beards, elongated necks, and dainty hands—to evoke both whimsy and psychological dissonance. Their fragmentary nature with misfit shirts, attenuated limbs, and disproportions suggest instability, transformation, and a continual state of becoming.

He received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1983, and his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2000. Since that time, Adams has exhibited widely across the United States and Europe. His work has been featured in significant publications such as Fragonard, Regards Croisés (2007), The Figure: Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture (2014) and New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting (2023). In addition, his practice has been the subject of international critical attention, with reviews and features appearing in New American Painting, Art in America, Bulletin du Musée Ingres (France), NeoMag (Italy), Novembre Magazine (France), Blisss Magazine, the Huffington Post, Just Magazine, and Hi-Fructose Magazine.

Adams’ work is represented in numerous institutional and public collections, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Woodmere Art Museum, the MOMA Library NYC, MOMA Wales, the LA County Museum of Art Research Library, Museu Brasileiro da Escultura (São Paulo, Brazil), the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as the collections at the Pennsylvania State Capitol, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis.