Dennis Adams


Dennis Adams is an American artist. He has made urban interventions and museum installations that reveal historical and political undercurrents in photography, cinema, public space and architecture.

About

Adams was born Des Moines, Iowa. Through his urban interventions and museum installations, Adams has focused on the conception of photography as a medium that has crucially transformed the representation of history as a primary means for the open reconstruction of imagery resonating within the realm of social context. His first decade of activity is best documented in the monograph entitled Dennis Adams: The Architecture of Amnesia. Beginning in 1998, Adams began to explore the medium of video and social engagement with projects such as OUTTAKE, Makedown, Spill and most recently Malraux's Shoes.

Work

Adams is a visual artist that has produced inversions of street architecture, urban interventions, performance videos, and works of art that form a discourse with historical and sociopolitical undercurrents in photography, cinema, public space and architecture. Since 1980, he has realized over fifty urban projects in cities worldwide from Antwerp to Zagreb. His work has been the subject of over seventy-five solo exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout North America and Europe including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; MHKA, Antwerp; The Kitchen, New York; DeAppel Foundation, Amsterdam; The Barcelona Pavilion, Fundacio Mies Van Der Rohe, Barcelona; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Portikus, Frankfurt; The Queens Museum of Art, New York. Numerous works can be viewed in public collections in the United States, France, Spain, Germany and Belgium.
Adams has produced site-specific interventions, often in highly visible locations such as bus shelters, and urban public settings that focus on the phenomenon of collective amnesia in the late twentieth century. A survey of ten years of site-specific works was published in a monograph entitled Dennis Adams: The Architecture of Amnesia written by Maryanne Staniszewski. The publication was followed by two mid-career surveys organized by the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen and the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston. Following the events of September 11 near his Tribeca studio, Adams created a poetic series of fourteen Ektachrome photographs portraying the detritus filled sky over lower Manhattan. The series was entitled AIRBORNE which after being shown in New York in 2002 was subsequently featured in the Le Mois de la Photo 2003 and PhotoEspana 2004.
Beginning in 1998 and continuing today, Adams began to explore the possibilities of video with his OUTTAKE, exhibited in Bremen, Berlin and with Kent in New York. Adams presented a 17:23-second segment from Bambule, a 1969 un-broadcast German documentary on delinquent girls directed by Ulrike Meinhof. These photographic stills were re-recorded as they were distributed in the Kurfurstendamm, Berlin, as "handbills," or "flyers," associated with political propaganda and advertising. Adams continued realizing a number of single channel videos including "Takedown", "Spill", "Curtain Call", "Black Belmondo" and prominently a performative installation entitled MAKE DOWN. Here, Adams addresses the complexity of layers of representation contained in one except from The Battle of Algiers, particularly in the context of the ongoing transformations of the historical conflict between Islamic and Western cultures. Instead of presuming to unravel these meanings, Adams chooses instead to locate himself between the frames of the image in a re-enactment of the process of disguise.
Adams has been a faculty member or Visiting Professor at numerous institutions including: Parsons School of Design, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, and the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Munich. From 1997 to 2004, he was the Director of the Visual Arts Program in the School of Architecture at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He currently lectures at Cooper Union, New York.

Artist books