Selected Press:
Artsy
Rising Artist Lindsay Adams Captures Black Liberation Through Wild Abstraction
By Katie White, June 18, 2026
Hube
Lindsay Adams on Fugitivity, Space, and Abstract Painting
By Editors, June 5, 2026
The Art Newspaper
Chicago’s Obama Presidential Center has art at its core
By Gabriella Angeleti, April 9, 2026
Artsy
Obama Presidential Center announces new works by Jeffrey Gibson, Rashid Johnson, and Lorna Simpson, among others
By Maxwell Rabb, April 9, 2026
To learn more about Lindsay Adams's Weary Blues, please visit obama.org.
Lindsay Adams is among the world-renowned artists whose commissioned works are part of the Obama Presidential Center. Opened in June 2026, the Obama Presidential Center has established public art as a central pillar of its mission, commissioning more than 25 new site-specific works across its 19-acre campus.
Lindsay Adams's work, for the Obama Presidential Center, entitled Weary Blues, after Langston Hughes’ iconic poem, is a meditation on resilience, beauty, and the power of abstract forms, and carries forward a lineage of Black creative expression that holds space for both weariness and transcendence. Originally created as an oil painting and adapted into fabric panels, the work features floating flowers against a moody blue field.
Lindsay Adams (b. Washington, D.C.) is a visual artist whose painting and drawing practice centers freedom, joy, and the expansive possibilities of imagination. Grounded in an academic background as a social scientist, the artist approaches abstraction as both inquiry and invitation. A formative encounter with the phrase “Keep your wonder moving,” from a letter by poet Patricia Spears Jones to Audre Lorde, crystallized her commitment to wonder as an active force. Through layered color, rhythmic gesture, and moments of delicacy set against bold brushwork, Adams creates spaces where resilience, transcendence, and joy coexist with nuance and complexity.
Alternating between abstract and representational forms, the artist employs a formal technique that highlights the physicality of paint and the delicacy of gesture. Trained in figuration, her work has since evolved into a broader visual language capable of holding multiple narratives at once. Her canvases are the result of 20 to 30 layers of paint, emphasizing the physicality of mark-making and the idea that surfaces carry an accumulation of meaning. In this way, she weaves multiple paintings within one, crafting a rich tapestry informed by interconnected experiences that invites reflection on the boundlessness of dreaming.
Adams received dual BAs from the University of Richmond and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her inaugural solo exhibition with Sean Kelly, Keep Your Wonder Moving in early 2025, marked her West Coast debut and was widely praised. In 2025, she was commissioned to create a public installation entitled Weary Blues for the Obama Presidential Center, which reimagines one of her gestural, gem-colored abstract paintings and opens in 2026. Named after the Langston Hughes poem of the same name, the work integrates visual art and Black literary legacy into a communal café space. Adams’ work has been exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, is held in major public and private collections, and has been recognized with the Helen Frankenthaler Award (2024). She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the World Trade Center through Silver Art Projects.