Today is the anniversary of the death of our beloved colleague, friend, mentor, and talented artist, Terry Adkins, who left this world too soon at the age of 60.
With work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, the Studio Museum, the Met, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and posthumously, the Whitney Biennial, he was just beginning – finally – to be noticed and admired internationally when he succumbed to heart failure. The New York Times described his work as “genre-blurring…cerebral yet viscerally evocative, unabashedly Modernist yet demonstrably rooted in African traditions.” In a reflection for Art Forum, Professor Ken Lum remembered Terry as “an artist who held steadfast to an idealism of art… Materials in the hands of Terry became so much more than their materiality. They became meditations on the processes by which stories are transformed into history.”
We feel his loss deeply. Today we are remembering and meditating on all that Terry left behind: his decades of wide ranging art, certainly, but also the many students he mentored, his long friendships in this community, and his family, of which we feel some small part.
