Artist Jerry Adams's dreamy watercolors first grabbed and held onto my heart in 2008 at a very special  exhibit. "The Artist's Voice: A Tennessee Exhibition Featuring Artists with Disabilities" bubbled up from a dream turned vision to a committee (of which I was a member) to the Conte Community Arts Gallery at Nashville's Frist Center for the Visual Arts where it hung in glory and then faced a sad, unfortunate death, failing to ever tour nationally as it was once envisioned.

Jerry Adams was but one artist whose work was discovered in the juried show of adult artists from major cities to Tennessee's rural nooks and crannies. Artists Yvette Renee Parrish-Cowden and Massood Taj, then both of Full Circle Art, took their magic artistry of love and encouragement on the road, statewide, teaching the workshop-attending artists with disAbilities how to compile a portfolio and market their work. Even four years later, I am struck at the oddity and the sadness, as I judge it, of that sentence. Like the rest of life that so many take for granted, artists with disAbilities are often disadvantaged, lacking supports and services to help them integrate fully into our society and do many of the things that others take for granted. For the duration of the project, "The Artist's Voice" helped spotlight the deserving Tennessee artists' talent.

Fortunately, Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, a national University Center for Excellence (UCED) and the first Intellectual and DD (developmental Disabiltiy) Research Center, established in a network of centers by President John F. Kennedy, continuously focuses on the work by and about artists and individuals with disAbilities in their lobby area gallery. Last week "The Journey with Grace" profiled currently featured exhibition artist, photographer Matthew Drumright. Painter Jerry Adams shares the current show's gallery space with Drumright.

Adams is driven by his passion to create art, but has little motivation, according to his website, for public accolades. Still, like all artists, he wishes to make his artistic endeavors a viable enterprise. Yet, with the hurdle of cerebral palsy, his challenges in this task are magnified as the disAbility impairs his motor skills.

His works of deep color and fluid motion are a kind of personal salvation for Adams, who has spent most of his adult life in segregated communal living environments where personal career gain is often out of reach. (Take note, special needs parents, please, about what you really wish for your children's future living).

Persistently painting since 1980, Adams has gained respect and recognition by private collectors and has been featured in exhibitions at Nashville International Airport's Arts in the Airport program, Vanderbilt University, The Tennessee Performing Arts Center and First American Bank. He received the 1993 Metro Davidson County Disabled Artist of the Year award, among other various honors. 

Go, Jerry, go. Paint, Jerry, paint….Your gift is an inspiration and a gift to eyes, heart and soul. Beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you, Vanderbilt Kennedy Center. More about Adams and Drumright's work, including photographs of the Vanderbilt show, here.

Above credits: photo, Farris Poole; painting by Adams, entitled "Subterranean Divide, Part One."