Meet Emily Davis Adams | Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Emily Davis Adams and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Emily, where are your from? We’d love to hear about how your background has played a role in who you are today?

I was born and raised in the Bay Area. Both of my parents are in the arts—my dad is a composer and my mom is a visual artist—and both worked in home studios my entire childhood (and continue to do so), keeping regular hours. In that regard, I had the lifestyle of an artist modeled for me as the same kind of job as any other that requires hard work and steady daily labor.

I also learned self-discipline and an appreciation for technical training through a rigorous childhood education in classical violin, which I think gave me the confidence to pursue what was at the time a very out-of-fashion path of representational painting and the mastering of traditional technical skills. I was always fascinated by representational painting and I found I was pretty good at it- enough to win some awards and be encouraged by family and friends to pursue it in college.

My experience at UCLA School of Arts and Architecture, where I spent my first two years of college, had the unexpected effect of turning me off of painting for a short while, even though being in Los Angeles exposed me to some of my biggest lasting artist influences, all of whom lived and worked in the city at some point. The painting department at the time was very male-dominated and anti-representational. In one final critique, the professor told me I should get a job at Disney, a lightly veiled and patronizing way of saying my work was bad and I should give up hope of being an artist. Luckily, I found my way to the photography department, which was filled with inspiring and engaged artists, including Catherine Opie, Walead Beshty and Shannon Ebner, the latter two I had the opportunity to study with. They introduced me to the writing of Roland Barthes, Walter Banjamin, Susan Sontag, among others, and challenged me to think with both conceptual and technical rigor about my work.

I also learned to give myself permission to pursue other interests and technical training without worrying about compromising my path as an artist. I ended up finishing my degree at UC Berkeley in a newly established (at the time) interdisciplinary major called Society and Environment, which emphasized a sociological and historically informed view of science. I took classes in bioethics, ecofeminism, food politics and agricultural history, alongside every painting class I could get into. I went deeper into my studies of technique and process by pursuing an MFA at the New York Academy of Art, and also through an apprenticeship with a monk who worked in the ancient tradition of Byzantine icon painting. It’s been a unique, and maybe to some circuitous, path, but has very much made me the artist and person I am today.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?

Motherhood has been critically important and a very big challenge to professional life as an artist, for me. When I was a student, many of the artists I was introduced to were men, and of the women few were mothers. I had mentors tell me motherhood would ruin any chance at having a career and even take away my creative energy (!). And it was hard to find a counter argument given how few mothers had made history as great artists. I did seek out feminist perspectives within the art world from a young age, which started with an undergraduate research paper on the revisions to Janson’s “comprehensive” History of Art, which was first published without a single mention of a female artist, and a deep dive into Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s involvement in creating the Feminist Art Project at Fresno State University here in California.

But the decision to have children was still a stressful one. I was eight months pregnant with my first daughter at the opening of my last solo show, and while preserving precious studio hours and developing my career has been a complicated road since then, there is no question that my creative energy and work ethic have strengthened as I have become a mother of two. I am very encouraged to see the recent increase in scholarship and literature around women and mother artists who have until recently been underrepresented or altogether forgotten, and also the increasing number of contemporary artists who are paving a path as important artists who are also mothers.

As far as the decision to pursue a life as an artist, I feel like Philip Guston said it best when he said that “being a painter has to do with self-development.” I’ve considered and attempted other careers—my undergraduate degree was part of a plan to become an environmental lawyer, and I’ve been employed as a part-time educator for a long time—but ultimately, I’ve felt that making art allows me to not have to be right about anything, which to me is a great freedom.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?

Well, the two people who immediately come to mind are already plenty recognized, so this is more of a tribute to my inspirations: I just finished listening to Toni Morrison reading her novel, The Bluest Eye, and it was a powerful reminder of what it means to be a truly great artist. In her author’s note she writes about her use of language and form as perhaps even more important than the characters and plot in her effort to embody and express her values as an author. Through her writing she is able to draw her readers into the complexity and mindscape of the experiences of perpetrator and victim of some of the vilest crimes without dehumanizing either with grotesqueness or pity. She demonstrates the web of human relationships that create suffering and oppression and emphasizes self-interrogation as a path to a more just society. It is a deeply humanist work of art and feels as important today as ever.

I also just re-listened to a wonderful series of lectures that the artist Charles Ray gave at the Menil Collection and I love his perspective on the nature of art. He says that every artwork we experience, regardless of when it was made, is contemporary because it is a part of our contemporary experience, and that authorship doesn’t matter, in the long run. He says of any given artwork, “If it’s great art it was born in its moment and stays in its present moment.” I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as I develop a new body of work that juxtaposes representations of women’s bodies from ancient Egypt to contemporary sculpture and innovations in humanoid robotics. I like the juxtaposition of things made under such different circumstances (places, times, cultures) in a way that emphasizes connections and parallels. It makes me think of the mythologies of the past that continue to cycle through our present-day experiences, from the ‘Pandora’s Box’ of Artificial Intelligence to the use of Medusa to demonize female political opponents, and the ever-present quest for individual and societal life extension.

Website: www.emilydavisadams.com

Instagram: @emilydavisadams

Image Credits
Andrea Rossetti and Future Gallery, Berlin