Terry Adkins

Terry Roger Adkins was an American artist. He was Professor of Fine Arts in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.

Adkins was an interdisciplinary artist whose practice included sculpture, performance, video, and photography. His artworks were often inspired by, dedicated to, or referred to musicians or musical instruments; specific installations and exhibitions were sometimes labeled "recitals." Sometimes, these arrangements of sculptures were "activated" in performances by Adkins' collaborative performance group, the Lone Wolf Recital Corps.

He led the Lone Wolf Recital Corps that premiering works at ICA London, Rote Fabrik, Zurich, New World Symphony, Miami, P.S.1 MOMA, and ICA Philadelphia.

Many of his works draw from the biographies of little known historical figures; his 2011 exhibition Nutjuitok (Polar Star) is based on the life of a black Arctic explorer named Matthew Henson who reached the North Pole with Robert Peary at the turn of the 20th century. In other cases, Adkins' works focus on obscure details in the lives of seminal figures such as the African American writer, activist and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, whose famous speech "Socialism and the American Negro" (1960) is invoked in the 2003-2008 installation Darkwater Record.

Adkins' work has been exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the Tate Modern in London. In 2012 he had a major retrospective at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. His work was also featured at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in Queens, the LedisFlam Gallery in Brooklyn and elsewhere.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023