Jeremy Anderson, Robert Arneson, Chester Arnold, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Chris Ballantyne, Robert Barnes, James Barsness, Jack Beal, William Beckman, Jose Bedia, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Yoan Capote, Enrique Chagoya, Mel Chin, Don Colley, Peter Dean, Roy De Forest, Valerie Demianchuk, Lesley Dill, Diane Edison, Manny Farber, Gregory Gillespie, Robert Hudson, Amer Kobaslija, Ansel Krut, Charles Marsh, James McGarrell, Arthur Leipzig, Andrew Lenaghan, Alfred Leslie, Tony May, Ron Nagle, Rosana Palazyan, Philip Pearlstein, Arnoldo Roche-Rabell, Peter Saul, Richard Shaw, James Surls, Joyce Treiman, Kako Ueda, James Valerio, H.C. Westermann, William T. Wiley, Sandy Winters, Philip Wofford
During the months of November and December the George Adams Gallery will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a group exhibition highlighting the breadth of the gallery’s programming. The exhibition will feature a selection of works by artists from the gallery’s history, ranging from key figures from the Bay Area, important realist painters, a generation of Latin American artists and contemporary artists more recently associated with the gallery.
George Adams joined the Allan Frumkin Gallery in 1980 and became a partner, forming the Frumkin/Adams Gallery, in 1988. At Frumkin’s retirement in 1995, Adams assumed sole ownership and the gallery took on its present identity as George Adams Gallery. A year later the gallery moved from 50 West 57 Street, its home for over 25 years, across the street to 41 West 57 Street, then, in 2005, to Chelsea, into the gallery’s first designed and built space at 531 West 26th Street.
While by 1980 artists such as Arneson, Azaceta, Beal, Beckman, Brown, De Forest, Hudson, Leslie, McGarrell, Pearlstein, Saul, Shaw, Valerio, Westermann and Wiley had established relationships with the gallery, those partnerships only continued to grow under Adams’ direction and many of that group continue to be a core part of the gallery’s program. In the following decades, Adams expanded the roster, adding artists such as Arnold, Barsness, Bedia, Capote, Chagoya, Chin, Dill, Edison, Kobaslija, Lenaghan, Leipzig, Palazyan, Roche-Rabell, Treiman and Ueda to the gallery, in many cases giving them their first solo exhibitions in New York.
As the gallery enters its fourth decade, it continues to draw on this rich heritage while also introducing and promoting emerging and under-recognized artists. Recently the gallery presented a 40-year survey of San Jose artist Tony May, his first solo show in New York. Planned for the new year is painter Chris Ballantyne’s New York debut, followed by a survey of Bay Area sculptor Jeremy Anderson. The gallery will return to the ADAA Art Show in February with a presentation of figurative paintings by Elmer Bischoff and in the spring, an exhibition of new paintings by Amer Kobaslija.