Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of prints, works on paper, and related video by Terry Adkins. Adkins began his artistic career making prints and continued to experiment with printmaking mediums throughout his life, despite his renown as a sculptor. Prints and works on paper dating from the 1990s through the 2010s will introduce Adkins’ prolific and little-known output in this medium, marking the first New York exhibition focused on this facet of the artist’s practice.

Adkins studied printmaking at Fisk and Howard Universities in the mid-1970s, where he was inspired by the medium’s ability “to transpose a gesture and to reproduce itself.”[1] It was through printmaking that the young artist was exposed to a wide range of materials and their potential applications, and became attuned to the significance of surface, texture and physicality.  Reflecting on his transition from printmaking to sculpture, Adkins noted: “I started working with materials I was familiar with from printmaking, like making sculpture out of wood, rice paper, and ephemeral things like that.”[2]

Adkins’ mastery of printmaking is evidenced through the variety of techniques on display in the exhibition. Works from the Djuka Suite (1997) combine photogravure and etching to layer symbols used in slave branding over photographs of tribal scarification, while a collagraph technique is used to transpose wild plant life in the artist’s botanical prints (2004–05). The Paradiso (2001) and After Bonnaterre (2013) series both belie Adkins’s preference––familiar from his sculptural practice––for found materials imbued with social and historical significance. Paradiso employs chine collé to layer metallic circles and ellipses over printed spreads pulled from a 1867 translation of Paradiso, the third and final chapter of Dante’s Divine Comedy, while botanical engravings provide a ground for vivid blue gouache in After Bonnaterre.

Investigations into the lives of historical African American figures often permeated Adkins’ work across media. This rigorous research-based methodology is evident in his Infinity Drawings (2003–2014), a daily practice in perfecting the so-called “Coltrane Circle”, John Coltrane’s innovative version of the “Circle of Fifths”, as well as The Philadelphia Negro Reconsidered (2012), a series of silkscreens made after the hand drawn maps in W.E.B. Du Bois’s sociological case study of Philadelphia’s Black community. Miy Paluk 1866 (2011) is a video installation in which Adkins embodies the spirit of Matthew Henson, the first African American Arctic explorer. Footage of Adkins dressed in furs in an icy landscape are bordered by flickering microscopic images of snow crystals. The layering of mediums and the nod to stereography echo the sequential nature of printmaking that was so informative to Adkins as he ruminated on the cumulative powers of repetition. 

Terry Adkins (1953–2014, b. Washington, D.C., d. Brooklyn, NY) was an artist and teacher whose work as a sculptor, musician, filmmaker, printmaker, and orchestrator of installations and experiences remains hugely influential. One-person exhibitions include Recital, Frances Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, NY & the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, IL (2012); an exhibition of video art at the University Galleries at Illinois State University (2016); a restaging of performances by the Lone Wolf Recital Corps, Adkins’ revolving collective, at the Museum of Modern Art, NY (2016); Infinity is Always Less Than One, ICA Miami (2018); Resounding, Pulitzer Arts Foundation (2018); and shows at the Fisk University and the Frist Museum in Nashville (2020). Adkins was included in the Performa Biennial (2013), the Whitney Biennial (2014) and the Venice Biennale (2015). Work by Adkins is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Studio Museum, in New York; The Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C., The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Fine Arts San Francisco; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Tate Collection, UK, among others.

[1] Alex Gartenfeld, Terry Adkins: Infinity is Always Less Than One, exh. cat., (Miami: Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami,  2018), p. 14
[2] Terry Adkins, Ian Berry, Okwui Enwezor, Terry Adkins: Recital, exh. cat., (Saratoga Springs: Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, 2012), p. 21