Sam Adams is the Ellen Johnson '33 Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College. They have a track record of forming advisory committees on diversity and inclusion, restituting looted artworks, and developing staff training programs on antiracism and ableism. They are a co-curator of the traveling exhibition, June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart (2025). Their 2024 exhibition, The Body, the Host: HIV/AIDS and Christianity was named best in visual arts by POZ Magazine. In 2021 they collaborated with textile artist Sonya Clark on a series of exhibitions addressing Civil War memory. Their other major exhibitions have addressed gender and sexuality, disability, craft, and spirituality.
Prior to Oberlin, Adams held curatorial positions at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Central Institute for Art History in Munich, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute. They hold a B.A. from New York University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. Their doctoral dissertation examined how theater set design in Cold War Germany circumvented the realism-abstraction divide of the Iron Curtain. Their scholarly writing and criticism appear in Afterimage, Art News, the edited series German Visual Culture, and exhibition catalogues for the Allen Memorial Art Museum, the Harvard Art Museums, the ICA Boston, and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.
