Camille Bacon speaks with painter Lindsay Adams about the people, places, and books that inspire her practice.
Camille Bacon: Where are you today?
Lindsay Adams: I’m at my studio at the World Trade Center for my residency at Silver Arts Project in New York.
CB: Can you take us with you to your grandfather’s garden?
LA: My grandfather was an artist and did not know it. He worked at the Smithsonian for most of his career. Most of the time he was at the National Air and Space Museum, but he also worked at the National Gallery. He loved photography and would always send me photos that he took; not on a professional camera, but once he got his cell phone he was a photographer.
He passed away two years ago, during the second semester of my post-bacc at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was very complex, very much a man of his generation. He was drafted to the Army, and upon his discharge he moved north to Maryland. He had his own migration story. He had all this complexity within him and he put all that into his garden. It stretched across his front and backyard and the landscaping was always immaculate. I’m remembering it across two different homes; one in Maryland and one in rural Virginia. There was always this sort of flowering. I could tell he was very interested in color and the texture. He was very serious about it. I have no clue where he learned any of this, by the way.
Even though he was a man of few words, his gardening felt like this very definitive act; it was his language. He would photograph his garden and make calendars and print them out on canvas. One flower landscape for each of the different months. This man had a whole studio practice, you know?
I painted a few times from the images he’d send me. Id text him asking if he had anything new to share and would exchange our musings of flora, clouds, and beautiful things we saw. I don’t use reference images anymore.
CB: You’re more in Lynette Yiadom-Boyake mode now, painting from environments you conjure in your own imagination.
LA: Yeah, it’s been about two years sans reference photos.
CB: There’s almost an alignment between your grandfather passing away and you no longer using reference images…
LA: Yes, I guess so. I didn’t think about that!
CB: Tell us about your love affair with Howardena Pindell’s practice.
LA: (smiles) The first time I saw Howardena’s work, I visited Richmond for my college (University of Richmond) homecoming. I was still working a corporate job and making art on the side. I went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to see Howardena’s retrospective, which started at the MCA, Chicago.
When I saw the work, I realized this was my first time seeing a retrospective from a Black woman artist. This moment, I think, opened up something in me spiritually. To see work at such scale, to see work that counterbalanced beauty and politics… complexity and tenderness; it was just all there. After that I could just not stop talking about Howardena Pindell. I read everything I could. I got some more catalogs. I watched lectures on YouTube. I was so inspired by her biography and her formal techniques. Then I started realizing all the things that we had in common.
CB: What rhymes across your lives and practices?
LA: We both attended all-girls schools. We both have disabilities. We both have had to find different ways to create and push back despite a number of constraints and conditions. I know she advocates for women artists and artists of color and has used her platform to address issues surrounding systemic racism and prejudice in the art world. I think about the advocacy work that I’ve done surrounding intersectionality and disability awareness, and how both inside and outside of the studio I find ways to shed light on issues and narratives that have been historically overlooked. And I think we both have a way with color… I say that humbly, honoring her (waves hands in praise).
CB: During a studio visit a few years ago I referred to one of your works as a “landscape painting” and you very astutely and gently corrected me. You call your paintings “floras.” Why?
LA: I think traditional landscape paintings are absolutely ravishing. When it comes to tackling environment and space, there’s an essence to them. I understand the commitment of it. But when it comes to the Hudson Valley School, for instance, that work was tied up in advancing concepts of Manifest Destiny and conquering the environment. When I think about landscape painting, I think about geography, and how they posit geography as enclosure, as domination, as occupation.
I have some of the notes I wrote when I was doing research. This is from a lecture that Katherine McKitrick gave at UVA a few years ago titled, “Curiosities, Wonder, and Black Methodologies.” She’s an expert in Black geographies and Critical Spatial Theory from the Black Studies and feminist lens. She talked about how the study of geography, traditionally, is inherently about enclosure and ownership and how Black geography, under what she calls “ungeography,” is “without the mandate for conquest.” When I think about discourses of “landscape” and I think about those in relation to my work, it’s more about that generative act of experiencing place, about adding to that place; not saying it’s mine but really experiencing it, embracing it, and adding to it in whatever way I can. It is an experience of both remembering and considering what was there before me, and imagining what may exist ahead.
My counter argument to traditional landscape painting is that geography is about transience and fugitivity, and not possession. My thesis is that true spaces of belonging are not rooted in geographical permanence, but emerge from an ephemeral core, something that accounts for movement and transience. That ethos is an important way to distinguish between conventional landscape paintings and my own work. My work is more about psychological landscape. There’s a celebration of the errantry of spirit here.
CB: In her Appalachian Elegy, bell hooks talks about growing up in rural Kentucky and how those in her community “were not wanting to tame the wildness in themselves or in nature.” Your paintings are invested in insisting upon the connection between interior and exterior landscapes – our own internal terrains and the environment itself. Beyond that, you also gesture towards said landscapes as something already sovereign unto themselves, as ecstatically unruly and, thus, to riff on hooks’ language, untamable. How has that framing served as a method of arrival at the canvas that helps you embrace the wild(er)ness within yourself?
LA: To draw on McKittrick again, both space and place have been racialized. There are these echoes of racialized violence. When you think about that violence, it’s characterized by restriction and control. Policing of who gets what and the rendering of hard lines. The counterpoint to that kind of taming is wildness, freedom and fugitivity, and that is an alternative kind of possession; not a physical possession, but a self possession.
I think about that in terms of the visual language of the work, especially when it comes to my evolution into abstraction. There’s this quote where Jack Whitten says that abstraction was waiting for him. My wildness lives in the underpainting. It was always there waiting for me in the buildup of form and gesture. I’ve begun to leave some of that underpainting exposed which allows the final rendering of the work to allude to that kind of wildness. My hand is present, hinting at my formal and emotional process of building, covering, and uncovering. So to bell hooks’ point, it’s untamed, unrestricted. But because of the way that I’m also a painter, I can both tame and untame at the same time. I can leave some of it wild, and refine other moments of visual clarity. I give myself and my painting permission to be. It can be both complex and shrewd, while also being peaceful and quiet. For me, I feel complete at the nexus between the two.
CB: The way you’re gesticulating right now makes me think of how embodied your practice is. Even as you talk about the work, your hands are moving with the vigor, intensity, and elegance of an orchestra conductor. In the studio, you are conducting an ensemble of color, mark and gesture across canvas. For me the orchestral lives in a realm of precision, restraint, and order, but there’s also something very wild about the way that they swell; they can’t be contained and that reminds me of what you’re saying, and also how you paint.
There’s a strong literary undercurrent to all of your work. What are you reading right now?
LA: (chuckles) Yeah, okay.
CB: Are you about to bring out a whole bookshelf?
LA: (Laughs) I would if I could, but I will share the three texts I’m actively reading.I think that’s solid.
CB: Just three?
LA: (smirks) The first one is Of My Own Making. It’s a memoir by a Black author named Daria Burke. The second one is Dark Space by Mario Gooden, which Amanda Williams gifted me, I just got it in the mail. The third one is called The Big Sea by Langston Hughes. It’s a beautiful autobiography talking about his travel and movement from Kentucky to Illinois to Harlem to Mexico City and back to Harlem (just to name a few stops on his epic adventure). What’s really sticking for me is how he created belonging for himself in his different communities. It’s important for me to read about other versions of the act around which my paintings are concerned.
CB: You’re like a walking bibliography… Your show at Sean Kelly, Keep your wonder moving, is titled after a quote from an epistolary exchange between Patricia Spears Jones and Audre Lorde that you found in The Sisterhood by Courtney Thorsson. The Patron show, All water has a perfect memory, is titled after a phrase from Toni Morrison’s essay The Site of Memory. Your compulsion towards citation is so special, and it’s infectious in that it shapes the way your work is written about. For example, Sarah Jane Cervenak appropriately grounded her reading of your work through the frame of the “clearing” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and used one of my favorite quotes from Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha as the epigraph for her essay. Can you speak about your bibliographic sensibility, that referential ethos which lend your marks a sort of reverential tone?
LA: My citational ethic comes through most explicitly in my titles.
Wonder was already in my spirit, it had been for a few years. I had already been looking at Field of Wonder, that Langston Hughes book that zakkiyyah [najeebah dumas o’neal] read from, remember? When we were all at the Johnson Publishing archive at Stony Island Arts Bank. For the show at Sean Kelly, wonder came back around the bend. The full quote I culled the title from goes like this: “My Mama used to say over and over sometimes sarcastically ‘Wonders never cease’ and she’s right. They don’t stop. Like love don’t stop. And courage. And friendship. Get sidetracked sometimes. But not stopped. So keep your wonder moving.” I was thinking about how Jones sent it to Lorde as she was navigating a storm of misogynoir. Jones implored Lorde to “keep [her] wonder moving” in spite of the constrictions she was experiencing. Still today, all these conditions are at play. First I was looking at “wonders never cease” as a possible title. But when Jones ended it with “keep your wonder moving,” what I thought was so dynamic about that was that it was a call to action.
The day the letter found me was also the anniversary of my grandmother’s death and I was also trying to conjure up a title for the show. When I saw the quote I literally said out loud “thank you grandma” because I know that was her.
CB: Two more details that feel significant here are that Jones is quoting something her mother used to say to her, so there’s that connection to the bountiful gifts our maternal lineages deliver us. Also, it feels really ordained that Jones’ letter was written on a notecard with a watercolor painting of roses on the front, which ties in your enamorment with the floral.
LA: Exactly!
In terms of Morrison, I read The Site of Memory last fall. A few years ago, I wrote down in my moleskine, “I’m painting land, air, space, and water. I’m painting environments.” This is why, again, I don’t want to call my paintings landscapes. Sometimes I feel like I’m painting air, sometimes I feel like I’m painting space, sometimes I feel like I’m painting water. I had that feeling of painting all of them at once. When I saw Morrison’s quote relating water to what she calls “rememory,” it was perfect because I’m always thinking about memory, place and placelessness. She was talking about the Mississippi River and thinking back to my points about belonging not being about geographical permanence, it made me wonder what happens when Black geographies are displaced and water overcomes them. She’s talking about actual geographies and also memory and also remembering. That quote was hitting on all cylinders. It was like a divine dialogue.
CB: In addition to serving as your titles, it’s as if the deluge of wisdom and clarity that you find through your reading practice propels both your paintbrush and heartbeat forward too. How does the Black feminist tradition, in particular, serve as a referential reservoir that nourishes you like an umbilical cord would?
LA: When I think about all the Black feminist scholars who I’ve been experiencing through their words or through their lectures, those who didn’t even know that they were working in that tradition at the time, they were working authentically as themselves and then the term was coined after. But the fact that they were occupying the spaces that they were professionally with such intention and fervor, not afraid of who they were, I’m naturally drawn to that. They offered a lot of strategies for building between and across all segments of the Black community. They also were very keen that their perspective was relevant in multiple conversations. It’s very telling of how powerful they are and how they refused to operate in a silo. I can only hope that my work can do the same.
CB: When I think about your practice, the word totality comes to mind. Black feminist authors across history have responded to a barometric pressure that’s projected onto them by forces working towards their demise. I use the word barometric specifically because it has meteorological connotations, it recalls the weather (word to Christina Sharpe) and the elements. I think totality comes to mind for that reason but also to what you were saying before. Like, I’m not painting landscapes, I’m painting a totality of an environment. How do you go about achieving this developing quality of the work?
LA: When I show up at the canvas, I have no idea where it will end. I don’t make studies for my work. I do a lot of drawing and work on paper, but they’re more like small experiments or small releases. When I approach every new work, the first decision I make is the color of the background. I make that one choice and then I intuitively respond to my own marks. It’s both additive and reductive because I’m laying marks down and then I’m taking them away and then I’m refining them, then I might also wipe them away. I’m cultivating the work. I’m laying down the soil, I’m laying down the seeds, I’m watering it, I’m also ripping it up. When it comes to building that environment, it’s just pushing and pulling, both formally from a painting perspective and spiritually, trusting that I’ll know when it’s done.
CB: Your work feels like a collision between a lullaby and a sorrow song. It’s the thrash between the delicate flowers and the storm that undoes their petals. Why is it important for the soothing and the torment to hold hands?
LA: I’ve been feeling this balance and battle between grief and gratitude. When it comes to the work and talking about that collision there’s this constant duality of the harmony in the quietude and the turbulence, which is expressive of the latitude of feeling we often experience living in this world both personally and collectively.
CB: Lately, you’ve been working with reflective surfaces. How did you make your way to the mirror?
LA: I’m very excited about the mirror works! I’ve done two of them so far. I did a version for my MFA thesis show that I arranged on the floor, and then I did another one called Refraction (2025) for the Patron show, which I installed on the wall.
I have an extensive drawing practice and try my hand at gestural abstraction by building layers of graphite and charcoal and ink and then coming in with more delicate line work. I had been using different kinds of paper. I thought that was great. When it came time to work on my thesis show, I wanted to start experimenting and see how these lines feel on something else. I wanted there to be a sculptural element to the body of work, an essence of expansion beyond working on conventional canvas or paper.
For the one at Patron, I wanted the viewer to be able to see themselves and I wanted the environment of the gallery to also be reflected in the work. But I am thinking about making it a bit more opaque and perhaps adding color. You and I have also talked about doing versions of this work that aren’t in a grid format. I think of many different ways to expand that.
Interview by Camille Bacon
