Yura Adams: A freewheeling conversation with Daniel Giordano

Daniel Giordano: Yura, I want to play a game of me spitting out a question and you rattling off an answer. A real Martin Kippenberger special of a “first thought, best thought” type response to keep us on our toes… Okay, so here we go: What artists do you steal from most and what bag of tricks did you whip out to aid in the making of your installation at Olympia?

Yura Adams: When I started out in painting, I analyzed the heck out of Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn, not realizing till later how carefully Diebenkorn had looked at Matisse. As a photographer and performance artist, I fully absorbed Man Ray and Oskar Schlemmer. As my involvement in art widened and I became confident in painting and installation, there was less influence that came into play. Nowadays, in the studio, I am on my own. Gawd, it is lonely! Glad you are here keeping me company.

So what is in my bag of tricks? I keep a package of expressionism from Max Beckmann, and dip into poetry of the Mary Oliver variety. I keep handy a box of color relationships that Matisse “lent” me and draw from general art house carousing from Rashid Johnson and Raymond Pettibon, a book of vocabulary translation from David Hammons, general antics and media line smashing from William Kentridge, time-honored formalism from Jasper Johns. The list is endless! Need I go on? All of it is in the paintings and the installation, not in equal parts, not obvious, but a sum of the ideas I have absorbed.

DG: To get to the reveal of who you are, how about some favorite things?

For example, what is your favorite song?

YA: “Summertime” in any variation, cover, interpretation.

DG: Favorite Beat?

YA: I love a waltz, (one-two-three, one-two-three). One of the best albums of all time was the Waltz Project produced by Nonesuch records.

DG: And Second favorite kind of music?

YA: I am kinky for yodeling.

DG: Ooh! When I come visit you in the Berkshires this summer, I want to yodel with the coyotes on the farm with you! Favorite saying?

YA: “Rise Above, Rise Above,” quoting Grandma McKercher.

DG: What’s your favorite memory?

YA: Lining up with my three sisters for a photo in look-alike dresses. I was the youngest girl, so I wore that dress for years as I grew into it.

DG: Favorite car ride of all time?

YA: Going 95 mph on the empty Iowa highway, my brother Mark driving his souped up and pristine Stingray Convertible, red of course.

DG: Second-favorite ride?

YA: The ancient, terrifying and probably lethal roller coaster at Arnold’s Park.

DG: Third-favorite ride?

YA: Skating fast and backwards on an outside edge.

DG: Let’s go the other way. Most traumatic art memory?

YA: I did some advanced-for-my-age blending of color with crayons in a coloring book and my two sisters accused me of lying when I claimed the work. I still remember the colors, two kinds of blue into a pink area, discovering how they created a neutral when blended. It was competitive growing up in a family of six children.

DG: Ah, a real Rosebud moment.

YA: What sticks out is the early memory of a color experience.

DG: Does anything from this list appear in your work?

YA: Certainly, my use of color. Sometimes I crave an orange, and red lurks on the edges. Everything floats in the stew that is me and appears in different ways in the work. For example, my imagery always has movement in it, and three favorites above mentioned speed. This is something I internalize. When I walk outside, everything is moving and changing as I move through the landscape. David Hockney brilliantly investigated this in his Polaroid series. Some of the favorites emanate from my childhood in Iowa. I addressed this in my early work as a performance artist. One of the performances was titled “I-Oh-Wah, ‘O Beautiful Land.’” My song Teen Madness was in that one, and I yodeled a little because I found it fascinating, wanted to try it and took singing lessons so that I could learn how to use my breath. This happened at the legendary art space 80 Langton in San Francisco. The yodeling was marginally passable; I was simply after the doing of it and kept it short in deference to the audience.

DG: When I drove across the country in 2016, I camped outside the Badlands and woke up and met some high-school-aged guys from Wisconsin who introduced themselves by saying they had never seen the ocean and asking if I knew about TruckNutz, explaining, that “they are the coolest thing.” When was the first time you experienced the ocean and beach?

YA: The only oceans Iowa had were the wide-open spaces. I had to wait until I was 18. I hitchhiked across the states from Iowa City with a sketchy English bloke, got on a motorcycle and promptly burned my calf on the tailpipe. When we got to the ocean, I ran into the water and it healed me.

DG: What’s your most irrational superstition in the studio?

YA: Protection by personal talismans: a metal corncob over the door outside (it represents my escape from Iowa and protects me from ever going back). A snarly angel I made is mounted over the studio entrance to keep bad art comments out. An 8×10 photo of my impossibly handsome dad hangs up high on the wall so he can watch over me. My grandma’s assemblage made of broken mirrors and costume jewelry keeps me pure.

DG: What’s the first piece of art you remember making that truly felt like you?

YA: I made an alligator costume out of a giant goodwill bag, stuffed its snout with tissue paper and stapled it together then painted it. That was a revelation – that I could make something from nothing.

DG: What were your favorite TV shows growing up?

YA: Gilligan’s Island was an early passion. I watched Leave it to Beaver carefully to try to parse out similarities because my mom knew the star, Jerry Mathers. He was born in Sioux City, Iowa, same as me, and I thought there was a mystery there, something I had to figure out, but there was nothing. I did not understand it at the time, and I found it deeply boring.

DG: What are your favorite activities outside of art making?

YA: I enjoy laughing.

DG: What’s the name of your first pet and the street you grew up on?

YA: I grew up on 7th Avenue till I was twelve. Misty, the big flat-furred gray cat, found him dead in the alley, shot with a BB Gun. My first experience with cruelty and horror.

DG: 7th Avenue Misty is your drag Queen name, then?

YA: OK! I had some experience with drag in my early twenties. I set up photographs of myself dressed as a man, in makeup, a fez, and a glower. I used to wear my fez all the time in dress-up situations and fantasized that I was Rimbaud.

DG: What’s the meaning behind “Companion,” the title of your exhibition?

YA: I grew some coral dinner-plate dahlias that were so wildly beautiful that I could not wait to visit them every day. They were the first ones that led me to the idea of having non-human companions. Birds, the sugar bush near my studio (a line of maple trees), and some cut-off, giant stumps keep me company in a quiet way in that they how they hold space and change with the weather and seasons. I treasure my human companions, but I also pay a lot of attention to specific parts of nature and make art about them/it/that/whatever it is. I also have an art-making companion inside of me – the driver that leads me to make art and guides my ideas and hand as I go, helps me make decisions, kind of a subconscious leash, or emotional mapping system. So “Companion” is a naming, a grateful thanking for these gifts, my helpers. But don’t worry, Daniel, I also love humans. And dogs and cats!!

DG: What’s the installation at Olympia all about, if anything?

YA: The installation fills up the room and creates a circular conversation between the walls and the paintings; an atmosphere.

DG: What tools are you using to apply the paint to make these paintings?

YA: Expansive tables of color mixing surfaces, gallons of my top-secret painting medium concoction, and eight thousand different painting tools.

DG: How much of the imagery is drawn from your natural surroundings versus improvisation and nuance?

YA: The windows to my studio are the sighting devices for my work. I see such good stuff out of those windows!

DG: I feel like there is a goofy spirit entity that loiters about your paintings. What’s your take on the goofy delight in your work?

YA: I surf the humor aesthetic. Humor helps me override my overly-sensitive nature and I delight in slightly cartoony forms that find their way into the paintings.

DG: How are you titling your individual works?

YA: The titles are doors. I invite the viewer into the work and poke at their poetic sensibility with the words. The titles all refer to stories about an experience I have had in nature, about events that are mundane but significant to me. Frequently the titles hover in my mind as I develop a piece.

DG: Obviously, the backdrop is something you painted in one way, shape, or form.

YA: I am so glad you think so. A wonderful painter said to me in my studio, “You are a master of disguise!”

DG: And all the paintings are oil on linen. Yura, you’re so fancy!

YA: Oil is how I roll right now, and I am obsessed with the color of the linen as a baseline for the paintings. Fancy is as fancy does.

DG: All these paintings feel like totems.

YA: I started as a figurative painter and the figure is still in there. I don’t want to nail down the subject, so I abstract the forms. The forms move in energy the same way a human does.

DG: There is a lot of poetry and nuance within the geometry of the paintings. I feel like you’re a conduit to what you’re seeing, smelling, and hearing within your geographic location on the farm where you live and work in Massachusetts as well as to the memory fuel of your life. It’s not only the essence I am feeling. I’m also taking in the mark-making – doodles, squeegee marks, luxurious brush strokes, and paint drips. No scumbling. What’s up with that?

YA: Wait … I scumble! Let’s not cast aspersions! In response to your beautiful summation of my work, I do hope my work operates on an expressive level but I also want to present ideas that are embedded in the work.

DG: And my final burning question: What’s your favorite ice cream?

YA: I will go with Rocky Road because it sounds like one of my titles.

“Yura Adams: Companion,” Olympia, 41 Orchard Street, upper level, New York, NY. Through June 21, 2025.

About the interviewer: Daniel Giordano is an artist based in Newburgh, NY. He is an impish hobgoblin who is quite passionate about tennis, avoids the sun at all costs, and enjoys a whole food plant-based lifestyle.