Lindsay Adams’ ‘Keep Your Wonder Moving’ Exhibition – Essence

In the heart of California, amidst the energy of Frieze LA, artist Lindsay Adams is offering something profound—an invitation to imagine. Her solo exhibition, KEEP YOUR WONDER MOVING, currently on view at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles through March 8, presents eleven abstract oil paintings bursting with color and layered meaning. The exhibition, which marks Adams’ debut with the gallery, explores resilience, freedom, and the everyday realities of Black womanhood, turning the canvas into a space for self-discovery and resistance against societal constraints.

Yet, the exhibition’s opening was almost overshadowed by an eerie, real-world parallel. The Altadena and Pacific Palisades wildfires, which devastated parts of Los Angeles in early January, forced the cancellation of the show’s opening reception. For Adams, the moment carried an almost prophetic weight—one of the key paintings in the exhibition, “FIRE THIS TIME,” had been titled long before the fires broke out. Inspired by James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and the spiritual that preceded it—“God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time”—the piece was originally a meditation on social and political unrest.

“When the fires started, I looked at my husband and said ‘oh my goodness,” Adams explains. “I knew what I was referencing, it was Baldwin’s essay. I was thinking about our social and political conditions. It was a week before the inauguration and we were dealing with all of this uncertainty. I know Baldwin said ‘fire next time,’ but maybe it’s starting this time.”

That sense of urgency and reflection is woven throughout KEEP YOUR WONDER MOVING, a title that came to Adams in an unexpected yet serendipitous moment. While reading Courtney Thorsson’s The Sisterhood—which documents a group of Black women writers, including Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison, who gathered in the 1970s—Adams came across a letter from poet Patricia Spears Jones to Lorde. In it, Jones urged, “Keep your wonder moving.” The phrase struck Adams immediately.

“I thought it was so powerful,” Adams says, thinking back to when she first saw the phrase. “I love the fact that [Jones] ended her note with ‘keep your wonder moving,’ because it’s more like an action, a movement of sorts. All of the things that I’m navigating and negotiating with this book about imagination and the power of possibility, I felt that sentence really encapsulated everything I’m feeling in terms of the abstract-ism, in terms of the color, and thinking very expansively.”

Adams’ shift from representational to abstract painting over the past few years aligns with this philosophy. Trained in figurative work, she found herself drawn to a more comprehensive visual language, one that allows for layered storytelling through texture, color, and space.

“It was a very natural transition,” the award-winning creative tells ESSENCE. “I was looking at the way I was building the work in the past—building the paintings layer by layer and some of the moments that happened in the paintings now, I was already doing that. When I really started to expand my hand and expand my visual vernacular, I realized that everything doesn’t need to be there in the way that I think it does. Oftentimes within the works, it’s really more visually compelling for some of that underpainting to be visible to the viewer.”

That uninhibited style is evident in pieces like “A BIT OF GLIMMER ON DARK DAYS,” a work that, as its title suggests, captures light amid struggle. Adams plays with contrast in her technique, using bold brushstrokes alongside delicate lines to evoke a sense of freedom and resilience. The physicality of her work—built up through 20 to 30 layers of paint—further reinforces these themes. “The canvas is holding a lot,” she says. “The weight of the paint, the depth of the layers—it’s a direct reflection of how we carry history, emotions, and resilience in our own bodies.”

As the showcase of her art runs during Black History Month, Adams also sees it as part of a broader cultural dialogue. “Black artistry doesn’t have to fit one mold. There are no literal figures in my paintings, but I am the figure—I made them,” she states. “We as Black people contain multitudes, and this work offers a field of wonder for us to exist beyond boundaries.”

With its vibrant abstraction, political undercurrents, and deeply personal narratives, KEEP YOUR WONDER MOVING is more than an exhibition—it’s an experience. And for those who pause, engage, and sit with the work, Adams hopes it sparks something within them.

“A viewer doesn’t owe it to the artist to stop,” the artist says, pausing briefly before verbalizing her final point. “You have to really put your work into the canvas to hope that someone will stop and spend time with your painting. When a person sits with the work, I’m interested to hear how they interpret what they see, and what they may feel, because I think it offers a special space for me.”