An Interview with artist Wayne Adams

Biola art professor Jonathan Anderson interviews New York-based artist Wayne Adams about his artistic practice and underlying themes of faith and theology in contemporary art.

Wayne Adams is a Brooklyn-based artist who received his B.F.A. from Calvin College and M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. Adams has exhibited throughout the Midwest, New York, and Vienna, Austria. Recent shows include “The Flat Files Year Three” (TSA, Brooklyn, NY, 2015), “Wayne Adams is Speaking in Tongues: A show of objects and images organized by the unrelenting voice of interpretation” (Barrington Center for the Arts, Wenham, MA, 2014), “Works Off Canvas” (Denny Gallery, NY, 2013), “Control Alt Delete” (HKJB, Brooklyn, NY, 2011), and “Adams | Miracle” (STOREFRONT Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2010).

Wayne Adam’s painting features diverse materials exploring the visual complexity and interplay of 2- and 3-dimensionality. Wayne comments that he is “interested in painting as a lens through which to reconcile my perception of the corporeal world with intangible notions of human emotion, experience, and meaning. It is an understanding of art as a treatise on human nature—the practice of making art as a means of making one more human. Recurring themes include Christian theology, material presence, humor, philosophy, and my daughter’s drawings.”
http://www.wayneadamsstudio.com/

Jonathan A. Anderson is an artist, art critic, and associate professor of art at Biola University, where he has been teaching since 2006. His research and writing focuses on modern and contemporary art, with a particular interest in exploring its relations to religion and theology. Anderson's writing has been published in books from Baylor University Press, InterVarsity Press, and Eerdmans (including the widely-read essay “The (In)visibility of Theology in Contemporary Art Criticism”), as well as in the journals Religion and the Arts, Christian Scholar's Review, Themelios, ARTS, The Christian Century, and others. Most recently, he is the coauthor with theologian William Dyrness of the book Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (IVP Academic, 2016).
http://jonathan-anderson.com/