Rachel Gloria Adams is a multi-disciplinary artist who works across mediums, creating paintings, murals, quilts, and graphic and textile designs. She brings a passion for color and bold, clear patterns to all her work. Her aesthetic sense developed early. Her mother was an artist and art teacher and had a vintage clothing shop. "She would frame African mud cloths and cover the house in Marimekko textiles,” says Adams. Visiting her mother’s store and classroom, and being surrounded by art projects at home, influenced her own trajectory as an artist. The Maine landscape, plant forms, conversations with peers, gallery visits, and fashion are just some of the sources she draws upon. Her recent pieced and sewn textile works, with their striking, abstract compositions, honor the celebrated quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Her latest paintings combine the beauty of flowers and the ocean and “merge the uninhibited approach to patterns and dynamic color combinations of my youth with my current visual language of botanicals and quilt motifs. Together they serve as a way of piecing together memories within an heirloom framework.”

Rachel Gloria Adams was born in Pennsylvania. She moved to Maine to attend the Maine College of Art and Design, where she received her BFA in 2015. She has shown her work in exhibitions throughout Maine, including the 2023 Biennial Exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. She has attended residencies at Speedwell Projects in Portland and the Stephen Pace House in Stonington, and received a 2022 David C. Driskell Fellowship and Black Seed Studio Residency at Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland. In addition to her studio practice, Adams maintains a textile design business TACHEE and has been commissioned to create numerous public murals, including for the Children’s Museum of Portland, the University of Maine, and the Farnsworth Art Museum. She lives in Portland, where she serves as a board member for Space Gallery.