Mirror I

Clinton Adams

Clinton Adams commented to cataloger Robert Conway in 2001 regarding this image: "The theme of the mirror is one of the richest in western art. Its complex iconography appears again and again in Renaissance, Baroque, and modern art. The window and the mirror are often closely allied. I most evidently dealt with the theme in my two 1953 lithographs "Secondhand Store" I and II. Here I returned to it, encasing the mirror in the triad element and in this version printing it in gray-silver tones that emphasize its spatial ambiguity. It doesn't matter if the mirror is placed in an abstract context. You break through the abstraction with a form like a mirror because a mirror itself is about as ambiguous as you can get."

Adams was born in Glendale, California on December 11, 1918. He earned a B.A. in education and a M.A. in 1942 from the University of California Los Angeles and began teaching there in 1946. He also taught at the Otis Art Institute and went on to head the art departments at both the University of Kentucky and the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Adams was introduced to printer Lynton Kistler in 1948 and began producing lithographs in his commercial print shop in Los Angeles. In 1959, he joined forces with artist June Wayne and the Tamarind Lithography Workshop was founded in Los Angeles in 1960 with Adams as associate director. He moved to Albuquerque in 1961 after accepting the position as dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. Tamarind moved to Albuquerque in 1970 and Adams became the Institute's director—a position he held for fifteen years. Adams' work is held in permanent collections through the United States and abroad.