Kenneth Miller Adams was the youngest and last artist elected to the Taos Society of Artists, the founding artist-in-residence at the University of New Mexico, and one of the most accomplished mid-twentieth-century painters of the Spanish American and Pueblo communities of northern New Mexico.
Kenneth Miller Adams (1897–1966) was an American painter, born in Topeka, Kansas, and a leading figure of the second generation of Taos Society artists. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League in New York under Kenneth Hayes Miller, Eugene Speicher, and others, and spent the summers of 1919 and 1920 working with Andrew Dasburg at the Art Students League's summer school in Woodstock, New York. Subsequent study in Italy and France completed his European training.
He moved to Taos in 1924 and was elected to the Taos Society of Artists in 1926, the youngest member of the group and, with the Society's dissolution the following year, its last new addition. His mature work concentrated on the people and landscape of northern New Mexico, particularly the Spanish American and Pueblo communities of the Rio Grande valley. In 1938 he received a Carnegie Corporation grant to become the first artist-in-residence at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he taught for the next twenty-five years until his retirement in 1963. Among his honours were prizes from the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Kansas City Art Institute, and the New Mexico State Fair, and his 1961 election to the National Academy of Design. His work is held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and other major institutions.