Home

Focusing on the idea of life’s impermanence, collage is the perfect way to experiment and move through a variety of ideas and media.  I am drawn to intersections: ideas that might seem to be at opposite ends of a continuum, like the organic and the geometric. My starting points vary: they can come from something I’ve drawn or painted, something glimpsed or from my experience of hearing a poem or piece of music. As a graduate student, I studied with John Cage; his early influence, to this day, inspires my studio practice of intention and chance.

A 2016 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, Tracey Adams has been an exhibiting artist for over 40 years. She has participated in over 175 solo and group exhibitions in the United States and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Monterey Museum of Art, Fresno Art Museum and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. Adams’ paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Bakersfield Museum of Art, Crocker Museum, Hunterdon Art Museum, Monterey Museum of Art, Fresno Art Museum, Tucson Art Museum and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in Encaustic Art: the complete guide to creating fine art with wax, Lissa Rankin, Watson-Gupthill, 2010, and Paper + Wax, Techniques in Handmade Paper and Encaustic, Michelle Belto, North Light Books, 2012. She has also received an Artist’s Grant from the Ministry of Culture, Slovak Republic, an Artist’s Grant from the U.S. Department of State and an Artist’s Grant from the Community Foundation of the Monterey Peninsula. Her immersive Installation, Primordial Soup, was exhibited recently at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2027, she will be having a solo exhibition, The Beauty of Transience, at the Monterey Museum of Art.