Lauren Frances Adams' work engages political and social histories through iconic images and architectural ornament. At the core of her works are critical explorations of labor and class in visual culture. She draws heavily upon the historical decorative arts to find contradictions within the contexts they originated. Objects such as wallpaper patterns, ceramics, and paintings do not simply reflect the mood of a given culture but are also tools for critique. Alongside painting and mixed-media installations, domestic materials take shape in her research on the construction of political identity.

Lauren Frances Adams earned her BFA at UNC-Chapel Hill, and completed her MFA in 2007 at Carnegie Mellon University. She was born in Snow Hill, North Carolina, on a pig farm. She lives and works in Baltimore.

She has exhibited at Nymans House National Trust (Sussex, England); The Walters Museum in Baltimore; The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. Recent projects include Smack Mellon in Brooklyn and Plug Projects in Kansas City. Her work about ecological disasters in America, American Catastrophe Report, was recently on view at American University in Washington, D.C.

She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has held residencies at the Cite in Paris and the Sacatar Foundation in Brazil. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award, and a 2016 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. She is the winner of the 2016 Trawick Prize.

Her work has been reviewed in Frieze Magazine, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Artslant, and Hyperallergic. Lauren is a founding member of Ortega y Gasset Projects, a project space in New York.