Videos by Sam Adams
The everyday act of sitting is a launch point for considering everyday biases in the exhibit “Lik... more The everyday act of sitting is a launch point for considering everyday biases in the exhibit “Like a Good Armchair: Getting Uncomfortable with Modern and Contemporary Art.”
“Chairs and sitting are loaded with significance and layers of privilege and the expression of different identities,” said Sam Adams, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.
“I started thinking about ableism, sit-ins, racism, ageism, manspreading, the way that sitting is a gendered act, and how each of these chairs in our collection — or portraits of images of sitting — spoke to those wider histories,” Adams said. 9 views
Book Reviews by Sam Adams
Books by Sam Adams
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, 2023
Bodies Are Fluid is the first in a series of exhibitions that celebrates women, femmes, and the f... more Bodies Are Fluid is the first in a series of exhibitions that celebrates women, femmes, and the feminine at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. This exhibition reassesses feminist artmaking with a commitment to learning from intersectional femininities that are nonwhite and non-cis-heteronormative.
deCordova New England Biennial 2019
This catalogue accompanies the exhibition "deCordova New England Biennial 2019," presented at deC... more This catalogue accompanies the exhibition "deCordova New England Biennial 2019," presented at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA from April 5 - September 15, 2019, featuring twenty-three artists from the six states of New England. Organized by Sarah Montross with Sam Adams, Scout Hutchinson, Martina Tanga, and Elizabeth Upenieks.
If the museum, for Paul Valéry, was where "we put the art of the past to death," artists througho... more If the museum, for Paul Valéry, was where "we put the art of the past to death," artists throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have undertaken projects of revival and renewal, assuming the roles of collector, archivist, and curator with subversive, political, or playful intent. They have reconfigured display mechanisms, reimagined taxonomies, and introduced into museums formerly banished objects and images. Artists have approached the museum gallery as a rich site of freighted yet pliable conventions and structures, a creative space of possibility.
Papers by Sam Adams
The Wild Within, 2020
An undulating slab of concrete poses atop a reflective steel plinth. Made specifically for deCord... more An undulating slab of concrete poses atop a reflective steel plinth. Made specifically for deCordova’s Sculpture Park, The Wild Within, evokes the reclining female nude, a common motif in art history. Using industrial materials and monumental proportions, Weiss’s piece turns a symbol of objectification into one of balance, strength, and sculptural innovation.
Through the overlapping identities of a single artist, a handful of objects under glass demonstra... more Through the overlapping identities of a single artist, a handful of objects under glass demonstrated how tradition is constantly being queered, subverted, and decolonized.
Since the ascendance of the term " identity politics " into mainstream discourse in the 1980s, th... more Since the ascendance of the term " identity politics " into mainstream discourse in the 1980s, the debate, vitriol, and confusion over what it means to acknowledge our unique subjectpositions in the world is enough to drive one away from using the term at all. But the moment we stop trying to acknowledge the politics of our identities we risk reducing our natural variation to a single level, an operation that has historically never ended well.
Boston’s small but storied campus galleries have long served as stepping-stones for museum curato... more Boston’s small but storied campus galleries have long served as stepping-stones for museum curators and directors on their way up [...]. Although their target audience is nominally students and scholars, these institutions fill a vital need for noncanonical programming in a city with a scarcity of both commercial and not-for-profit exhibition spaces.
In a video from the mid-1980s, Knowles hammers away at a typewriter, as if playing piano. The hyp... more In a video from the mid-1980s, Knowles hammers away at a typewriter, as if playing piano. The hypnotic sound of that action becomes a visual effect marked in ink.
The drawing biennial includes sixty works by fifty-six artists in the Boston Center for the Arts'... more The drawing biennial includes sixty works by fifty-six artists in the Boston Center for the Arts' Mills Gallery. All hew closely to the themes of line and touch, transcending a condition of flatness that the exhibition takes as drawing’s essential condition.
The public is once more disingenuously watched over and art is called upon to provide circumscrib... more The public is once more disingenuously watched over and art is called upon to provide circumscribed resistance to a culture of fear.
Curator Klaus Biesenbach at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) has long wished to mount ... more Curator Klaus Biesenbach at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) has long wished to mount an exhibition devoted to Björk’s multi-media artistry and finally was able to do so concurrently with the New York concert series. Björk was implicated in the history of art long before her MoMA retrospective in a number of ways that surprisingly are nowhere evident in the exhibition.
Uploads
Videos by Sam Adams
“Chairs and sitting are loaded with significance and layers of privilege and the expression of different identities,” said Sam Adams, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.
“I started thinking about ableism, sit-ins, racism, ageism, manspreading, the way that sitting is a gendered act, and how each of these chairs in our collection — or portraits of images of sitting — spoke to those wider histories,” Adams said.
Book Reviews by Sam Adams
Books by Sam Adams
Papers by Sam Adams
“Chairs and sitting are loaded with significance and layers of privilege and the expression of different identities,” said Sam Adams, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.
“I started thinking about ableism, sit-ins, racism, ageism, manspreading, the way that sitting is a gendered act, and how each of these chairs in our collection — or portraits of images of sitting — spoke to those wider histories,” Adams said.