Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, printmaking, drawing
Website: adrianna-adams.squarespace.com
Adrianna Adams was born in 1993 in the United States and earned a BFA with a double major in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016. She attended the Yale Summer School of Art in Norfolk, Connecticut in 2015, and lives and works in Oakland, California.
Adams’s printmaking practice developed in close collaboration with the West Oakland studio Sun Night Editions, which produced her large-scale screenprints and relief prints. In 2020, her seven-color screenprint Weekly Routine #1 was acquired by the Mills College Art Museum through a student-led purchase in the Fall 2020 Museum Studies Workshop. The following year she was selected as one of two Artists-in-Residence for Print Center New York’s Mapping Narratives: New Prints 2021/Winter, completing an IPCNY At Home Residency in her Oakland studio and going on to show the resulting prints in New Prints In Focus at the same institution.
Beyond studio and print work, Adams has contributed to Bay Area community mural projects, including the Women of The Resistance mural and the Alto al Fuego en la Misión mural in San Francisco’s Mission District, which memorializes victims of police violence. Her work has also been exhibited in 10xTEN: 100 Bay Area Womxn Artists at Faultline Artspace in Oakland.
Adams’s paintings and prints explore what she describes as “extensions of the feminine self” and its counterparts, using hair, botanical imagery, and pattern as carriers of cultural identity and memory. Her 16-color screenprint Lookin’ examines internal and external modes of looking versus seeing, probing how inherited beauty standards and historical narratives shape perception. A related suite of relief prints made during her IPCNY residency honors friends’ memories through botanical motifs and patterning drawn from their hair textures, folding personal reflection and shared history into a single image.
Her layered, highly worked screenprints – some built from as many as sixteen color passes – sit alongside looser, plant-inspired relief work, giving her practice a dual register: meticulous and process-driven in the print studio, more intuitive and observational in drawing and mural work.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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