Adams's career runs across the seam between the historic Taos Society of Artists and the postwar New Mexico modernist tradition, a younger painter who entered the Society in its closing year and who carried the figural and observational seriousness of that group forward into a long teaching career at the University of New Mexico.
Adams came to art from a Topeka childhood spent copying pictures from public library books. The youngest of five children in a Kansas household, he supplied his own early visual education through that quiet, sustained practice, and his subsequent decision to pursue serious art training brought him to Chicago and then to New York. The Art Students League placed him within one of the most rigorous teaching environments in early-twentieth-century American art, and his teachers there gave him a thorough grounding in observational figure painting and in the disciplines of academic composition.
The decisive teacher of his early career was Andrew Dasburg, whose Woodstock summer instruction Adams attended in 1919 and 1920. Dasburg, himself a leading younger modernist, would later move to Taos and play a central role in opening the New Mexican art world to Cubist-influenced abstraction. Adams's exposure to Dasburg both deepened his understanding of modern composition and pointed him toward the Southwest, and his subsequent study trips to Italy and France gave him a broader European foundation before he made the move to Taos.
His arrival in Taos placed him among an established but still active artistic community. The original Taos Society members, Phillips, Sharp, Couse, Berninghaus, Blumenschein, Ufer, and others, were the senior figures of the colony, and Adams's election to the Society made him the last and youngest of the painters formally inducted. The group dissolved formally the following year, but the working community of Taos painters continued, and Adams remained one of its most respected younger members.
His mature work concentrated on the human subjects of the Rio Grande valley. Where many of the older Taos Society painters had focused on the Pueblo peoples almost exclusively, Adams gave equal attention to the Spanish American Hispano communities of northern New Mexico, paintings of farmers, weavers, mothers, and laborers rendered with a careful, dignified observation that owed as much to his Art Students League training as to his New Mexican subjects. His landscape work continued in parallel, and his portrait commissions through the 1930s and 1940s extended his practice into the broader American portrait tradition.
The Carnegie grant and the subsequent University of New Mexico appointment defined the second half of his career. Across twenty-five years at UNM he became one of the most influential teachers of figurative and landscape painting in the postwar American Southwest, and the institutional position gave him the platform from which to maintain his own studio practice through the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s. His position today is that of one of the most accomplished representatives of the second generation of Taos painters, and a key figure in the formal and institutional development of twentieth-century New Mexican art.