Kenneth Miller Adams, painter, printmaker, muralist, and educator, was born in Topeka, Kansas on August 6, 1897. His early art training began with George M. Stone in Topeka at the age of sixteen-years-old. In 1916, he enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago but his studies were interrupted due to being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1918. Adams enrolled in the Art Students League of New York in 1919 and studied with Kenneth Hayes Miller, Arthur Bridgman, Alexander Sterne, and Eugene Speicher. The summers of 1919 and 1920 were spent painting under the direction of Andrew Dasburg at the Art Students League summer school in Woodstock, New York. From 1921 to 1923, Adams studied in France and Italy, painting landscapes he exhibited in Topeka.

In 1924, Adams moved to New Mexico and settled in Taos with an introduction from Dasburg to painter Walter Ufer. Adams became the youngest and last member of the Taos Society of Artists. He began teaching in 1929 at the University of New Mexico’s Field School of Art in Taos during the summer.

The dominant subjects in Adams’ work became the Spanish Americans, the Pueblo peoples, and the landscape of New Mexico. On one of his visits to Taos in the late twenties B.J.O. Nordfeldt admired certain of Adams' drawings and suggested they would make fine lithographs. He gave Adams several zinc plates and some crayons and Adams began creating modernist lithographs.

In 1938, Adams moved to Albuquerque after being awarded a Carnegie Corporation Grant to become the first artist-in-residence at the University of New Mexico. He taught at the UNM Albuquerque for the next twenty-five years and became a full professor. In 1938, he was elected an Associate Member of the National Academy of Design in New York and was elevated to full Academician in 1961. He was also a member of the Prairie Printmakers, Phi Kappa Phi, Audubon Artists, the American Artist Congress, and the Woodstock Artists Association.

A major retrospective exhibition of Adams’ work was mounted at The Art Gallery, University of New Mexico in 1964. Adams’ work is represented in the collection of the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; the Wichita Art Museum, Kansas; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Kenneth Miller Adams died in Albuquerque, New Mexico on June 27, 1966.