Dennis Adams

Dennis Adams
Dennis Adams, Malraux's Shoes, 2012
Born	Dennis Adams 1948 Iowa, United States
Nationality	American
Known for	Photography, public sculpture, installation, film

Dennis Adams (b. 1948 Des Moines, Iowa) is an American artist internationally recognized for his urban interventions and museum installations that reveal historical and political undercurrents in photography, cinema, public space and architecture.

Dennis Adams emerged by the 1980s through his urban interventions and museum installations that reveal historical and political undercurrents of our collective memory both in the United States and Europe, best documented in the monograph entitled Dennis Adams: The Architecture of Amnesia (1989). Beginning in 1999, Adams began to explore the medium of video and social engagement with projects such as OUTTAKE (1999), Makedown (2004), Spill (2009) and most recently Malraux’s Shoes (2012).

From the metamorphosis of Patricia Hearst to the SLA, and back again, to the trial of Klaus Barbie, from the omissions and distortions of Joseph McCarthy to the execution of the Rosenbergs, Adams has singled out controversial figures and events from our not-too-distant past that, if buried underneath layers of silence, still carry an explosive charge. Over the past four decades, Adams has produced site-specific works, often in highly visible locations such as bus shelters, and urban public settings that focus on the phenomenon of collective amnesia in the late twentieth century. A survey of ten years of site-specific interventions was published in a monograph entitled Dennis Adams: The Architecture of Amnesia (1989) written by Maryanne Staniszewski. The publication was followed by two mid-career surveys organized by the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen and the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston.

Beginning in 1998, Adams began to explore the possibilities of video with his OUTTAKE, exhibited in Bremen, Berlin and with Kent in New York. Adams presented a 17:23-second segment (416 film stills) from Bambule, a 1969 unbroadcast German documentary on delinquent girls directed by Ulrike Meinhof. These photographic stills were re-recorded as they were distributed in the Kurfurstendamm, Berlin, as "handbills," or "flyers," associated with political propaganda and advertising.

Following the events of September 11 near his Tribeca studio, Adams created a poetic series of fourteen Ektachrome photographs portraying the detritus filled sky over lower Manhattan. The series was entitled AIRBORNE' which after being shown in New York in 2002 was subsequently featured in the Le Mois de la Photo (Montreal) 2003 and PhotoEspana (Madrid) 2004.