Dennis Adams Des Moines, IA, b. 1948

Dennis Adams’ work addresses historical and sociopolitical undercurrents in photography, cinema, public space and architecture. He has completed over fifty urban projects in cities throughout the United States and Europe from Antwerp to Zagreb. Adams has also been the subject of seventy-five solo exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout North America and Europe and is included in numerous public collections. In addition to a robust public profile, Adams has received three Fellowship Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984, 1988, and 1995; the David Dinkins/Manhattan Borough President’s Award in the Arts in 1986; the DAAD Fellowship, Berliner Künstlerprogramm in 1989, the Lily Auchincloss Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts in 2004, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.

Dennis Adams belongs to a generation of artists such as Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Jeff Wall, Muntadas, and others whose reputation and achievements were first supported and celebrated in Europe. For Adams, much of his work beginning in the 80s and 90s were public projects involving street architecture and institutional interventions. Published as a collective body of work by the book entitled The Architecture of Amnesia (1989), these international projects were presented together for the first time leading to a series of major exhibitions at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerpen, the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Moving beyond the issues of institutional critique by the end of the nineties, Adams would immerse himself into a series of well received performance based videos including Outtake ( 1999), Takedown (2000), Seize (2001), Freeload (2004), Makedown (2005), Spill (2010) and Malraux’s Shoes (2012).

Adams has taught at numerous institutions, including Parsons School of Design at The New School for Social Research, New York; École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam; the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich; Malmö Art Academy, Sweden; and the Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway. From 1997 to 2001, he was the Director of the Visual Arts Program and Professor in the School of Architecture at MIT, Cambridge. Since 2001, Adams has been a Professor at The Cooper Union in New York City.