Jamie Adams

 

Biography

Jamie Adams is an honors graduate from Carnegie Mellon University (BFA) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (MFA).

Adams' most recent work is confined to the small, private spaces of personal memoir, presenting simple themes of love, desire, and relationship, inevitably mixed with aberrations of self-doubt, anxiety, or some form of rescue phantasy. One example is a series of "jeannie" paintings, based on the Euro-American filmBreathless (A bout de Souffle by Jean-Luc Godard), which seek to reframe Patricia's (Jean Seberg) apartment as painting studio. The work, loosely referencing grisaille underpainting, 60s photos, thenouvelle vague, American film noir, or Italiancine-fotoromanzis, proposes an inaccessible, yet jouissant vision invaded by the artist.

Adams' work has been collected throughout the country, as well as Austria and Japan. Besides many private commissions, he has completed numerous public commissions, including a virtual gallery of more official state portraits than any other artist in Pennsylvania's illustrious history. Notable public commissions include Pennsylvania Governor Robert P. Casey, former University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Wesley Posvar, Carnegie Mellon's Dr. Edward R. Schatz, the late Cardinal John J. Wright, Pennsylvania House Speaker John Perzel, and many other Speakers and Senate leaders.

Adams is represented by Jack the Pelican Presents Gallery in NYC and Philip Slein Gallery in Saint Louis. He resides with his wife and children in Saint Louis, Missouri where he is the Director of the Core Program and an Assistant Professor in the College of Art at Washington University in Saint Louis.