Forget-me-not

2021

36 feet long, 14 feet high

Site-specific wallpaper with custom painted details, including 19th century painted Baltimore chair from the museum collection installed at the Baltimore Museum of Art

November 2021 - April 2022

This wallpaper artwork fragments and reconnects elements from 19th century decorative objects in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s collection to explore difficult legacies from Baltimore City history, 1800-1850, when it was one of the largest cities in the country and the site of a busy port. Pointing specifically to Baltimore Album Quilts - textiles with a regionally distinct visual language -- and luxury furniture in the BMA’s collection produced for a powerful class of moneyed white Baltimore elites. Transforming and recombining multiple museum objects to expand aesthetic and narrative relationships across time (such as with the museum’s ancient Roman mosaics), this work highlights the limits and opportunities of collective memory in symbols of political and cultural importance. 

This artwork was made by collaging painted and printed papers, scanning them, and digitally repeating them to form the patterned wallpaper. The painted colors and textures mimic the British and French imported fabrics typical of Baltimore Album Quilts of the period. Garlands that would typically feature a ship, monument, or bible instead now include moments from Baltimore history (such as a copy of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s publication, ‘Forest Leaves’), or from the BMA’s collection (such as a tiny moth from a Joshua Johnson painted portrait). Some blocks merge both history and museum object -- the wooden wardrobe made in 1830 by Quaker furnituremaker John Needles, monumentalized to replace the Washington monument in Baltimore, with his memoir’s activist remembrances blooming into a frame of flowers for the enlarged carved paw of the furniture’s base.   Other blocks gather artifacts such as a British-made abolitionist jug on display elsewhere in the museum, spilling feathers found in various artworks located in the same gallery.  Birds become liberated, deformed, or expired; moths wave flags of mourning, and abundant cornucopias shake until empty. Grief and loss, as well as hope and despair, are common themes in response to the bright and lively Baltimore Album Quilt inspirations.

Spolia:
The Spolia paintings fragment numerous neoclassical decorative schema found in Baltimore Painted Furniture, such as scrolls, swags, stripes and bows, as well as mythical fauna and trophies. On each small painting is an actual section of a wooden chair, from two chairs I found in my alley. I wanted to incorporate a physical reference to my neighborhood, similar to the chairs that served as inspiration in the BMA’s collection, and fortuitously found it literally in my own backyard. This white-painted furniture foregrounds the idea of erasure amid an excess of decoration. The 19th century mirror has a bold, imposing eagle at its apex. The mirror’s authoritative form and typical use as an object to reflect a room and its inhabitants is affirmed and subverted: In this case, the mirror is hung very high and will not reflect the visitors in the gallery, which is also a kind of commentary on reckoning with the places and things protected by an incomplete American history. 

Installation view, All Due Respect, November 2021. The Baltimore Museum of Art, photo by Mitro Hood

This site-specific public art project on view from 2020 - 2021 at the Center for the Study of the American South intervenes throughout CSAS’ location in a historic home on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The installation encompasses sculptures that evoke the historic fire screens found in house museums from the antebellum era in the United States, as well as a wallpaper display that depicts an illusory excavation into the walls of the building. 

CSAS’ offices are located in a renovated building that is the former home of Cornelia Phillips Spencer. Spencer is a well-known figure on UNC’s campus. She was a White woman who was active as an author and historian in the mid-to-late 19th century in Chapel Hill. Her copious writings evince White supremacist and patriarchal beliefs. Her influence on the university was intertwined with her political activism that advanced Lost Cause Confederate mythology in the postbellum era. Her segregationist beliefs initially helped close the University for a period. Her impact has had a strong presence on campus in the 20th century, with a campus dorm named for her. 

Despite the repeated calls to remove Spencer from an honorific position in campus memory, a portrait of Spencer, along with reproductions of several of her botanical watercolors, hang in the main parlor of the CSAS offices. My project takes on the complex and troubling endowment of Cornelia Phillips Spencer, weaving together Spencer’s own words as irrefutable evidence in the persistent lineage of perpetual racism and sexism in the University’s official actions in our present day.

The painted sculptures are distributed throughout the Center for the Study of the American South’s building, in front of the 5 fireplaces extant today. Historic fire screens were domestic objects typically made of wood or metal that assist in regulating the warmth of a parlor fire for those seated nearby. Fire screens often feature precious paintings and embroidery, often by upper middle class young women, as a display of their technical skill and trained virtuosity. Pastoral scenes and decorative patterns were common visual themes, and the fire screens I made for ‘Imagining UNC’s Future with Art,’ recycle appropriations of Spencer’s own floral paintings (held in the Southern Historical Collection of Wilson Library at UNC) as backdrops for embroidered texts

Full text and documentation can be found at: https://imaginingfuture.unc.edu/

The series of paintings on panel explore the recent removal of the Confederate monuments in Baltimore – and who put them there. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (and other activist groups) were responsible for constructing false Civil War narratives and for the intense rallying around monuments to Confederate memory in the 20th century - many installed 50-90 years after the end of the Civil War. This series of paintings and prints focus on the women of the UDC, ahistorical mythmaking of the Lost Cause, and whiteness, in an attempt to reveal connections between white supremacy and the shaping of public opinion through monument building.

Anatomy of Style in New France: Louis XV/Code Noir

Printed vinyl and three individual paintings (gouache and acrylic on paper, 2014)

2016

New France was the name of the territory stretching from New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River (including parts of Kansas and Missouri) to Canada during the French colonial period (16th-18th centuries). Louis XV was the king of France during this later period, and in 1724 at the age of 13, he signed into effect the second version of the Code Noir.   This ‘black code’ consolidated the French legal framework concerning slavery in North America, restricting the rights of enslaved and free blacks and outlining the religious entitlements of all French subjects. The painted texts in the wallpaper are from this regulatory decree. The pixelated objects depicted in the wallpaper are from the Nelson-Atkins Museum collection of Louis XV style furniture, objects created in a style once popular in France and roughly concurrent with this later era of French trade and settlement in Illinois Country / Upper Louisiana. Collapsing ornament and oppression, the Code Noir textual extracts combined with archival evidence of the monarchy’s finest furnishings offer an acute contrast concerning an important period in the history of Missouri, and in the United States.

Positioned on the background image and hanging as if slightly askew in a genuine and grand domestic space are three paintings from my ongoing series, Decorum. Decorum is an incomplete index of the histories of enslaved people from antiquity to the present. Decorative and textual sources trace the complex structures that surround labor and power inequalities. My sources are frequently found in museum collections, where the museum acts as both witness and author.  Archival remnants of  narratives, ornament, and my own personal inquiries constitute an open-ended process of asking how the decorative arts participate, either actively or silently, in promoting or reflecting dominant ideologies of social hierarchy, political authority, and cultural fantasy.

In the summer of 2017, the City of Alexandria’s Office of the Arts partners with Baltimore-based artists Stewart Watson and Lauren Frances Adams for a series of site-specific installations inspired by the history of Gadsby’s Tavern Museum. Centennial of the Everyday features artistic interventions tucked in among the historic exhibits.
 
These works of art reflect the artists’ extensive research on the history of women, enslaved peoples, and anonymous citizens in Alexandria whose stories are rarely told in light of the typical fêting of historically famous individuals, such as America’s Founding Fathers.
Living community members are featured who have a relationship to the Gadsby Tavern building or John Gadsby himself (such as descendants of John Gadsby and Nancy Syphax, one of the women enslaved by John Gadsby during the 19th century).
 
Encompassing familiar domestic materials such as furniture, stoneware, and textiles, Watson and Adams evocatively document period-specific historic ephemera (such as architecture, newspaper reports, poetry, portraiture of anonymous women, and textile patterns) in new contexts. Animated video, the Female Stranger’s canopy bedding, and a sculptural reversal of the ‘Alexandria Ballroom’ acknowledging the centennial of its acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, comprise just a few of the works which are on display.
The artists weave themes of anonymity, loss, connectivity and the fragility of memory in museum and public record archives alongside the lived stories of present-day Alexandrians. 

I began this project in search of objects in The Walters Museum collection that depicted enslaved peoples. Expanding my inquiry into the museum as labor archive, Precarious Prototypes ultimately explores the mannered representations of servitude and objectification within the museum’s collection. Select objects are exhibited as well as printed, to understand and unsettle the role of the museum as master narrator. And so, the drapery both reveals and conceals, becoming an index of unstable contradictions. Specifically, I am looking at how depictions of the body as subservient, contorted, dehumanized, grotesque and lacking agency, unravel how art history becomes art as history.
As installed at the Walters Museum, with textiles of the artist's design as well as museum objects.

September 1, 2014 - May 2015
Washington, D.C.

Artist Lauren Frances Adams has created American Catastrophe Report, an installation that acts as both homage and critique of the decorative frescoes in the United States Capitol Building, originally painted in the 19th c. by Italian-born artist Constantino Brumidi. The site-specific artwork by Adams is installed in American University’s Katzen Arts Center, in both the upper and lower rotunda in the center of the building, less than six miles from where Brumidi’s paintings are located. The prints forming American Catastrophe Report have the appearance of paintings due to the unique process Adams uses, where hand-painted originals are digitally scanned then printed for long-term public display. Adams updates Brumidi’s Capitol ornamentation by directly addressing ecological disasters in America that have been caused by human activities.
Visitors to the Katzen Arts Center will see an installation that is a mix of appropriated and invented imagery. Adams adapts Brumidi’s original frescoes in the U.S. Senate Wing that picture landscapes of the sparsely populated western states of the mid-19th century, as well as a variety of detailed images of birds. According to historians, Brumidi copied from lithographs in the Pacific Railroad Report and the Mexican Boundary Report, published in the 1850’s. It is possible that Brumidi’s incorporation of these landscapes were intended to not only celebrate scenic visions of America but also to promote a comprehensive identity of American geography and inevitable settlement. Further promoting specificity of place, the birds pictured in the Senate wing point to the importance of uniquely American subject matter in Brumidi’s efforts. Assistant curator for the Office of Senate Curator, Amy Elizabeth Burton, writes about the time capsule nature of the paintings, stating in the catalogue (published in 2014) To Make Beautiful the Capitol: Rediscovering the Art of Constantino Brumidi, “Brumidi’s birds reflect the 19-century surge in westward expansion and federal support for exploration and scientific discovery across the young and developing nation.”
Extending and celebrating this act of copying, Lauren Frances Adams has updated Brumidi’s masterful efforts with similar themes -- landscapes and ornithological images -- but with a decidedly different artistic outcome. Reflecting a century and a half of human enterprise since Brumidi’s time, a selection of landscapes in decorative cartouches offers up these situations: Fracking (in rural Pennsylvania), the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Mountaintop Removal Mining (in West Virginia), the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill (in the Gulf of Mexico), and Climate Change (specified as glacial retreat in Alaska). Corresponding to each man-made ecological disaster, and pointing towards the totalizing effects of habitat destruction, pollution via chemicals and garbage, and changes in weather conditions, Adams has included several birds that represent the threats to fauna as environmental destruction advances: Scarlet Tanager, Bristle-Thighed Curlew, Cerulean Warbler, Brown Pelican, and the Tufted Puffin.

Other imagery present throughout the rotunda gives depth to the historical relationships between American citizens and our physical landscape. Acting as symbolic prescience, ornamental designs incorporate two birds distinctly absent from America today: the Carolina Parakeet and the Passenger Pigeon, both extinct. Decorative flora in the paintings incorporates kudzu, a non-native species that has caused widespread ecological damage in the United States. Other imagery near the project signage incorporates invasive species in North America: Africanized bee, Common Starling, Nutria, Cabbage White butterfly, and the Emerald Ash Borer. Lofted high above, two medallions face one another in the upper rotunda: a war-like eagle and a gentle lamb. Utilizing the neoclassical aesthetic employed by Constantino Brumidi (who was in turn inspired by ornamental Renaissance paintings in the Vatican), Adams incorporates uniquely American identifications, inviting visitors to the American University Katzen Arts Center to reflect upon the conundrum of the contemporary American condition visualized in American Catastrophe Report.

Installed at Nymans House and Gardens in West Sussex, England for the exhibition Unravelling the National Trust. Nymans House and Garden is a National Trust property known primarily for its exquisite English garden, which has been designed and developed by three generations of the Messel family. The artwork is a large-scale fan inspired by the Messel family fan collection (at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK). Grand Tour Fan appropriates from the original c. 18th century Grand Tour Fan on display in Cambridge. This fan inserts intentionally banal public places from contemporary Sussex life into the historical framework -- substituting scenes of Italian ruins with those of Gatwick Airport (just a few miles from Nymans House).

WE THE PEOPLE, a new solo project for Expo Chicago/2012 at the Navy Pier, September 19 – 24, 2012.

Lauren Adams: We the People is organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) and curated by Kelly Shindler, Assistant Curator.

Lauren Adams’s work addresses historical issues of colonialism—the system by which the people of one territory establish systems of authority or control over people in another territory—and industrialization to demonstrate how they inform our present-day reality. Working in a variety of media from painting and drawing to textiles and printmaking, she repurposes centuries-old imagery to explore the relationship between labor and the production of material goods. Adams uses specific images, symbols, and situations from these histories to suggest how they play a significant role in the balance of power between social classes, nations, and ethnicities today.

We the People is an interactive installation in which the artist has painted slogans from recent Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party protests into reproduced Revolutionary War-era wallpaper. The pattern, entitled “General Samuel McClellan,” features a repeated image of various everyday objects from the 18th-century. Extracted and abstracted from its original context, the protest language visible on the wallpaper functions as a generalized call to action. Visitors to CAM’s booth can record their own “protest” on a unique ceramic plate to be displayed during the fair. A custom-designed tea towel made exclusively for Expo Chicago both advertises the project and is exchanged with visitors in return for their contributions.