Caley Adams

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Full Name: Caley Adams

Thumbnail of Featured Art: Yellow Flowers, 16" x 20" x 0.75", 2025

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Studio Street Address:: 98 4th Street / 98 4th Street

Studio Street Address Detail: Third floor, suite # 303

Zip Code: 11231

Artist Statement: Caley Adams is a New York City based artist whose early life in Maine shaped the way she thinks about making things. Growing up in a coastal community surrounded by working artists gave her an early appreciation for things that are handmade, imperfect, and shaped over time. Today, she works primarily in mixed media and acrylic on canvas from her studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Adams builds her paintings slowly, often returning to the same canvas again and again. She layers paint, paper, writing, and pieces of old journal entries into the work, sometimes covering them completely and sometimes scratching back through the paint to reveal what was there before. She often works on reused canvases, including old paintings of her own and canvases found at flea markets and thrift stores. She likes the idea that a painting doesn’t have to begin with a blank surface. Something can have a life before you, and you can add another chapter to it. That idea of what we carry with us has become increasingly important in her work. While much of her earlier painting focused on abstract florals and the natural world, her recent work has shifted toward women. She is interested in what it feels like to move through the world as a woman, and the complicated mix of expectations, freedoms, restrictions, roles, and identities that come with that. Her newer paintings explore women’s rights more directly, as well as questions around identity, autonomy, and how much of ourselves we show, hide, or change in response to the world around us. Women and the female figure now appear more frequently in the work, sometimes alongside masks, barriers, empty spaces, or other simple visual symbols. Adams is interested in using these images to talk about experiences that can be difficult to put into words. The work is personal, but it also comes from experiences and questions shared by many women. The physical way Adams paints hasn’t changed. Layers still matter. History still matters. She leaves mistakes, scratches, dust, fibers, and unexpected marks rather than trying to make every surface perfect. Earlier versions of a painting are allowed to show through. For her, those traces are part of the point. At its core, the work is about being changed by what we live through without completely losing what came before. A painting can be covered, scratched into, painted over, damaged, repaired, and changed while still carrying every version of itself underneath. Increasingly, Adams is using that idea to think about women, our bodies, our choices, and the different ways we learn to take up space in the world.

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