Artist: Lindsay Adams

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles presents Keep Your Wonder Moving, the West Coast debut of Chicago-based artist Lindsay Adams and her inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. Titled after a note written by poet Patricia Spears Jones to philosopher Audre Lorde, the exhibition, presented on the third floor, consists of eleven abstract paintings. Keep Your Wonder Moving emphasizes the artist’s longstanding interest in world-building – Adams’ exploration of abstraction as a conduit for expanding the imagination while embedding deeply personal narratives.

Adams’ work interrogates the boundaries of abstraction and representation, seamlessly weaving together the materiality of paint with the intangibility of memory and cultural identity. Her layered approach—where pigments are built up, washed away, or otherwise manipulated—imbues each canvas with a sense of flux, reflecting her assertion that painting is as much alchemical as it is artistic. Her process leaves behind not only a complex surface, but also an ambiguity that invites sustained contemplation.

Keep Your Wonder Moving pivots from her earlier figurative depictions of nature and Black subjects to a complex abstract vernacular. As Adams describes, this transition emerged as “an inevitable shift toward expressing a conceptual story, allowing myself latitude in my storytelling and cultural reflection.” The works on view highlight her interest in constructing imagined ecologies, spaces in which rhythmic gestures and dynamic hues engage in a continuous dialogue. For instance, in Rhythm With Blues, electric yellow and lavender forms bloom against an inky blue background, evoking a field of abstracted flowers that resist traditional representational constraints. Adams challenges the viewer to question the delineations of form to embrace the unknown.

Thematically, Adams situates her practice at the intersection of resilience, freedom, and the quotidian realities of Black womanhood. Her work transforms the canvas into an aspirational site—one that allows for intimate encounters with self-discovery and resistance against societal constraints. This ethos resonates with her political and cultural identity, as her paintings assert their presence within a broader discourse of artistic and social transformation. The exhibition thus positions painting as both a reflective and generative act, with Adams’ compositions acting as sites where meaning is not prescribed but rather discovered.

Lindsay Adams is currently finalizing her MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a BA in both International Studies and Spanish from The University of Richmond. She has already garnered critical recognition, including the prestigious Helen Frankenthaler Award in 2024 and the New Artist Society Merit Award in 2023. Her work has been exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C., and is included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and Northwestern Law School.