AACG - Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass

Travis Adams

Artist Statement:

The opportunity to create Seeing Green through a collaboration with Ale-8-One represents a unique intersection of art, material, history, and place. Ale-8-One is a Kentucky staple with more than a century of history within the Commonwealth, and my friendship with the company’s owners and family has given me a personal connection not only to the beverage itself, but also to the cultural history and identity it represents.

The works in this exhibition are created from recycled green glass originating from Ale-8-One’s former returnable glass bottle program. After the program was discontinued, bottles that remained became an unexpected resource for artistic exploration. These bottles are now being melted and transformed in the studio at Trifecta: Glass-Art- Lounge, allowing a material once associated with a familiar Kentucky tradition to take on a new life within the context of fine art.

For me, Seeing Green is not simply an exhibition made from green glass. It is an exploration of how material carries memory and how objects connected to a particular place can be transformed without losing their history. The green glass becomes both medium and symbol—a direct connection to Kentucky, its landscape, its traditions, and the experiences that have shaped my own artistic perspective.

The exhibition includes works from my recent figurative series, particularly formal blown-glass busts, in which the human form becomes another vehicle for exploring identity, environment, and place. The symbolism embedded within these works draws heavily from my experience of growing up in Kentucky and from my continuing interest in our relationship with the environments that surround us.

Seeing Green is ultimately a deeply Kentucky exhibition: one that brings together a familiar material, a beloved Kentucky tradition, recycled resources, and contemporary fine art. It offers an opportunity to reconsider something ordinary and familiar through a different lens, transforming a material with a specific cultural history into something new while allowing its original story to remain present.

About Travis Adams

Born and raised in Shelbyville, Kentucky, Travis Adams began his artistic journey under the influence of prolific Kentucky painter Joe Burks. Although Adams initially pursued a practical career path, majoring in financial economics at Centre College, his experience in the glass studio with artist and educator Stephen Rolfe Powell fundamentally altered the course of his life. Captivated by the material, process, and immediacy of glassblowing, Adams began to pursue a career in the arts.

Powell became an important mentor during Adams’s formative years, introducing him to the possibilities of glass as both a technical discipline and an expressive medium. Adams later continued his education through the Master of Fine Arts program at Illinois State University under the direction of John Miller. The influence of Burks, Powell, and Miller remains fundamental to Adams’s development, providing distinct perspectives that helped shape his understanding of painting, glass, and contemporary art while allowing him to develop an increasingly individual visual language.

Throughout his education and professional practice, Adams has maintained an interest in traditional Chinese painting and the study of gongshi, or Chinese scholars’ rocks. These investigations continue to inform his approach to abstraction, landscape, and the relationship between humans and the natural world. Nature remains a continuous source of inspiration, particularly the ways in which our environments shape our perceptions and, in turn, are shaped by our presence.

Adams’s technical approach is grounded in a traditional understanding of glassmaking, incorporating Venetian techniques alongside the uniquely expressive history of American glassblowing. This combination allows him to move between disciplined craftsmanship and a more fluid, intuitive use of the material. His practice encompasses multiple ongoing bodies of work, including increasingly figurative and formal blown-glass sculptures.

Adams’s work has been exhibited nationally and continues to develop through an evolving engagement with material, place, and personal experience. His current practice reflects a distinctly Kentucky perspective while situating that experience within broader conversations surrounding nature, environment, cultural history, and contemporary glass.

Acknowledgment of Gallery:
We are grateful to Trifecta: Glass-Art-Lounge, , Lexington, Kentucky, for providing the Artist of the Month.