Pat Adams: After All, Book Launch with Grid Books + Taylor Davis

Join us for a Book Launch and Opening Reception celebrating the publication of Pat Adams: After All, the latest in a series of monographs by independent Boston publisher Grid Books, showcasing fine art curated through artistic collaboration and intergenerational exchange.

6:00–7:00 pm, Artist Talk, Sert Gallery, Level 3
7:00–8:00 pm, Opening Reception, Level 3 + Terrace

Free and open to the public. 

When working from her studio became too challenging, mixed-media artist Pat Adams converted a guest room in her home into a smaller, more accessible workspace. Here she has assembled hundreds of small, yet intricate, collage and mixed-media pieces that feel both different from and continuous with the larger work she has long been known for. Despite departures in size and format, this work encapsulates the full variety of forms and media that Adams has explored, and expanded on, over a seventy-year career.

Artist and teacher Taylor Davis will read from Adams’ writings. Publisher Elizabeth Murphy will provide an introduction to the project. 

Grid Books is a non-profit publisher whose mission is to foreground creative work that springs from the margins, with a special focus on the work of older writers and artists and on projects generated through intergenerational exchange.

Pat Adams (American, b. 1928) was raised in Stockton, California, and began painting at the age of ten. She studied painting at UC Berkeley from 1945–49, where she first encountered the ideas of Hans Hofmann as she studied under his former students—Worth Ryder and Margaret Peterson O’Hagan, who had arranged for Hofmann’s migration to the States in 1932, among them. During her summers at Berkeley she pursued programs at the California College of Arts and Crafts (1945), the College of the Pacific (1946), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1948). In 1950, following her graduation from Berkeley the previous year, she attended a summer session at Brooklyn Museum Art School, remaining in the city after its completion. She received her first solo exhibition in 1954 at the Korman Gallery—later to be renamed the Zabriskie Gallery, which would continue to represent her through 2018. Her work was greatly motivated by her international travel during the 1950s: in Italy in 1951, after her first husband, painter and printmaker Vincent Longo was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, and in France in 1956, after she received her own Fulbright scholarship.

In the fall of 1964 she was invited by professor Paul Feeley to teach at Bennington college, where she joined the social circle of the famous “Green Mountain Boys,” including Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. In 1972 she married fellow Bennington professor R. Arnold Ricks, and they set off with her two sons on a four-month journey through Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and all of Europe, which impacted her work significantly. She continued teaching at Bennington through 1993.

Her lengthy career has also included many teaching appointments at Yale, as both a visiting professor and artist, as well as the Rhode Island School of Design, among numerous other institutions across the country. She has received notable awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Academy of Design, and the College Art Association. In 1995 she was awarded the Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Her work has been the subject of over fifty solo exhibitions. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.

Taylor Davis (b. 1959 in Palm Springs, CA) is a visual artist living in Boston, MA. Her exacting forms encompass sculpture, drawing, collage, and painting. She received her Diploma of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and her MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Honors include a Rauschenberg Residency, a Radcliffe Fellowship, an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the ICA Foster Prize.

A committed teacher, Davis is a professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has taught as co-chair and faculty at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College since 2003.

Elizabeth Murphy is a poet and editor and is the director of Grid Books and its imprint Off the Grid Press. Her edition of literary correspondence of American poet Donald Justice and novelist Richard Stern, A Critical Friendship, was published in 2013 by University of Nebraska Press. A collection of her poems, in the form of an exchange with the late poet Taylor Stoehr, was published in 2018 by Pressed Wafer.