UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art
Las Vegas, Nevada
We believe everyone deserves access to art that challenges our understanding of the present and inspires us to create a future that makes space for us all.
MessageAdkins was born in Dover, New Jersey. In 2003 he received his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. The large, wooden sculptures that we show at the Barrick are a departure for Adkins, who has spent most of his career as an abstract painter. His canvases are often covered with bright, broad, swerving marks that appear to have been drawn rapidly across the surface, though he has also worked with hard-edged horizontal stripes. Jawbreaker and We All Dream of Revenge come from a series of box-shaped pieces that had their origins in the packing crates he saw around him at work. Kristen Peterson in the Las Vegas Weekly described a show of his related works as “a striking display of minimalism for an artist who began his career hating the movement” and compared the crates to the work of Sol LeWitt.