Clinton Adams

(Glendale, California, 1918 - 2002)

North America, American

Clinton Adams is known as both an artist and writer and one of the most important influences on the development of fine-art printmaking in America.

In 1960, Mr. Adams helped start the renowned Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles with the artist and printmaker June Wayne. The program was intended to revive the art of lithography by training apprentices to become masters of the medium and by collaborating with well-known artists in the production of marketable works.

In 1970, the program moved to Albuquerque, where it was renamed the Tamarind Institute and made a division of the University of New Mexico. Mr. Adams, who had been a dean at the university since 1961, continued as director of the institute until his retirement in 1985.

As a painter and printmaker, he produced a low-key mix of traditional representation and Modernist abstraction. He had more than 30 solo exhibitions, and his works were collected by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

But his influence was most widely disseminated through his writings, including "The Tamarind Book of Lithography: Art and Techniques" (Harry N. Abrams, 1971), which he wrote with Garo Antreasian and which is considered the standard text on the subject.

He also wrote the definitive history "American Lithographers 1900-1960: The Artists and Their Printers" (University of New Mexico Press, 1983).

Born on Dec. 11, 1918, in Glendale, Calif., Mr. Adams studied art at the University of California at Los Angeles. After serving in the Army Air Forced during World War II, he returned to teach at U.C.L.A. and began to study lithography. During the 1950's, Mr. Adams was chairman of the art departments of the University of Kentucky at Lexington and the University of Florida at Gainesville before returning to Los Angeles and helping to start the Tamarind Lithography Workshop.

He died at his home in Albequerque in May, 2002, and was survived by his wife, Mary, whom he married in 1943.

View objects by this artist.