Adam
Stephenson

I paint large murals with bold, vibrant and communicative imagery. I was born and raised in Decatur, Alabama, and I live in Atlanta, where I've been making murals professionally since 2019.

My best work seeks to reveal a threshold, a place where the physical world and the spirit realm occupy the same space at the same time. A mural can be a portal: an image that opens onto something deeper than what's visible. The moment a musician and their instrument dissolve into each other and reach into a realm beyond the physical.

My heart is embedded in work that draws from the people I've loved and the experiences that have mattered most, including the ones involving loss. Loss is profound and universal, and I don't avoid it in the work. Those are the pieces that feel like they matter in a different way than anything else I make.

Murals are persistent and public. They reach people who would never walk into a gallery, and they reach them by surprise, at the right moment, in a context they weren't expecting. I believe that encounter changes something. It doesn't happen for everyone. But for the right person at the right time, it does.

Background

My practice has taken me from festival circuits across the Southeast to permanent commissions in Atlanta, Nashville, Chattanooga, and beyond.

Homecoming, my 2019 mural for the Alabama College of Art in Decatur, remains one of the most personal pieces I've made, painted in my hometown, in memory of my sister Lara Lee, who passed away in 2006. Not a memorial, but a celebration of the beautiful, ephemeral parts of life.