Terry Adkins

Terry Roger Adkins was born in Washington, D.C. in 1953 and grew up in Alexandria. As a teenager during the integration of Northern Virginia’s private schools, he was admitted as the first African American student at Ascension Academy on West Braddock Road — the campus that today serves as 4401 West Braddock Road Place 4401 West Braddock Road Middle School (grades 6–8) of St. Stephen's & St. Agnes since the late 1990s, on the West Braddock Road campus that previously housed Ascension Academy — the small independent … ^[1] Source 1 Google Arts & Culture — Terry Adkins Website .

Adkins went on to study art at Fisk University (B.S., 1975), Illinois State University (M.S., 1977), and the University of Kentucky (M.F.A., 1979). He spent a decade in Europe in the 1980s — Germany and Holland — before returning to the United States and a permanent academic post at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught sculpture from 1999 until his death.

His artistic practice — which he called the recital — combined sculpture, drawing, performance, video, and original music into research-driven installations focused on the under-told lives of Black historical figures. Major recitals were dedicated to George Washington Carver, Bessie Smith, Jimi Hendrix, John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Matthew Henson, among others. His work was acquired by the Whitney, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and other major institutions.

Adkins was a member of the artist collective Lone Wolf Recital Corps, a touring performance ensemble he founded in 1986. He was a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow and posthumously included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

He died in Brooklyn, New York, on February 8, 2014, at age 60.