Hank Murta Adams
American, born 1956Roto, 2004
On view
Cast glass, copper
Dimensions28 1/2 × 15 × 13 3/4 in. (72.4 × 38.1 × 34.9 cm)
Courtesy of the Isabel Foundation, L2017.142
Hank Adams creates figurative busts that are not individual portraits. Instead, they are whimsically expressive, generalized characters that explore the human experience. As a student at Rhode Island School of Design, Adams painted portraits before meeting his teacher Dale Chihuly, who inspired him to consider glass as a medium for his figures. Adams’s work abandons the conventional tendency to utilize the translucent and refractive qualities of glass in favor of an opaque surface, giving the forms a solid and heavy appearance. Each heavy bust is cast slowly in a mold and embedded with wire and other fragments of material found in and around his studio.
