Kenneth Miller Adams (1897-1966)

Kenneth Adams was still a teenager when the Taos Society of Artists was founded in 1915. He was the youngest member and the last to join the group, becoming a member only a year before the Society disbanded.

Adams was born in Topeka, Kansas, where his uncle, Colonel C. K. Holiday, was the founder of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Company. Describing the Topeka of his childhood, Adams once recalled that the town didn’t have much use for art except as a hobby for the “womenfolk.”

Adams found a more hospitable environment at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he enrolled in 1916. After that, he studied at the Art Students League in New York and met Andrew Dasburg, arguably the greatest single influence on Adams’s painting style.

Adams also admired Mexican mural painters Orozco and Siqueiros. Dasburg once characterized Adams’s work as rooted principally in the life of the Spanish community in Taos. Although Adams also painted Native Americans, his emphasis on Hispanic subjects set him apart, Dasburg thought, from the older TSA painters.

In Taos, Adams was impressed by the beauty of the landscape but put off by the town’s remoteness. He often struggled with loneliness and uncertainty about his talent. Walter Ufer, whose career was also launched in Chicago, helped Adams by finding him a painting space close to Ufer’s own studio on the east side of the road to Santa Fe. The studio had an unimpeded view several miles south to Ranchos de Taos, the place where Adams eventually chose to live.

During the Depression, Adams worked for a number of federal arts programs run by the US Treasury but was unable to make a living in Taos and moved to Albuquerque. In 1937, he became the first artist in residence at the University of New Mexico. The following year, he joined the faculty of the Art Department at UNM and taught there as a professor for 25 years.

By the 1940s, Adams had become known as much for his lithographs as for his paintings.

UNM held a retrospective of Kenneth Adams’s work in 1964.