Alonzo Adams

Born, 1961 in Harlem, New York

Alonzo Adams was one of the artists included in Black Romantic, subtitled The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art was an exhibition hosted by The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2002. Featuring some 30 artists, Black Romantic was described by Lowery Stokes Sims, the Studio Museum’s Director, as an exhibition in which “elements of desire, dreams, determination, and romance particular to the black experience present a viewpoint that is oppositional to modernist conceptualization of blackness flavoured by exogenous exoticism, stereotype, caricature, and even abstractionist manipulation.”

The exhibition was reviewed by James Trainor, for Frieze, Issue 69, September 2002. Trainor’s review was sensitive, considered and discussed the exhibition with great clarity. Amongst his concluding comments, “The Studio Museum in Harlem is in an uneviable position. On the one hand it represents a community and a culture, while on the other it is committed to presenting the foremost achievements of African-American artists to a wider world. The museum has been criticized by some in the black community, especialy in its own bavckyard, Harlem, for ignoring precisely this kind of art in favour of the highbrow avant-garde practices that will be accepted downtown. ‘Black Romantic’ seems to be an acknowledgement and a questioing of those criticisms, and deserves credit for raising the issue of which black artists are on the inside and which are on the outside, and why.”

Within the Black Romantic catalogue’s text is All Good: Interview with Alonzo Adams, by LeRonn Brooks, illustrated with one of Adams’ paintings. In the interview, Adams states “Well, everyone knows I love Charles White, I’m a big Charles White fan. I’m a big [Henry Ossawa] Tanner fan and I’m a big fan of Thomas Eakins, his teacher. I was a big fan of Rembrandt. There was also a French artist named Jean Millet, I love his work. believe it or not, I like a lot of contemporary Asian artists, too. I love their work, the ones who work in the traditional realistic and impressionistic styles…”

»  Black Romantic - catalogue

Catalogue relating to an exhibition, 2002

»  Black Romantic - review

Review relating to an exhibition, 2002