Adam Fulwiler, the Hardy Gallery’s executive director and the featured artist in the Miller Art Museum’s new 12×12 Project exhibit series. Submitted.
Adam Fulwiler | 12×12 Project is on view through the end of the month at the Miller Art Museum.
Painter and Hardy Gallery executive director Fulwiler is the first artist featured in the museum’s new 12×12 Project. Conceived as an intimate platform for focused presentations of new work shaping the regional art landscape, this invitational exhibition series highlights contemporary artists working across disciplines throughout Wisconsin and the greater Midwest.
A free artist talk with Fulwiler will take place on Saturday, June 13, at 4 pm, with a public reception to follow.
At the heart of Fulwiler’s work is his relationship with his younger brother, who experiences the world through the heightened perception of autism. Rather than describing that experience directly, Fulwiler translates it through a personal language of color, shape, rhythm and spatial tension, constructing paintings that honor the extraordinary sensitivity with which his brother perceives life. A road trip the two shared in 2019, during which his brother cataloged the passing landscape with meticulous, equal attention to every object and detail, became a defining moment within the work.
Improvisation also plays a central role in Fulwiler’s artistic practice. Fulwiler often employs games, puzzles and self-imposed rules within the studio, allowing structure and spontaneity to coexist. The resulting paintings move with the cadence of jazz, balancing repetition with interruption.
Fulwiler’s recent Stack works, shaped in part by playing blocks with his young son, explore the emotional tension between balance and collapse. Fragments of painted material are layered, sewn and reconstructed into surfaces that recall quilting, mapping systems, architecture and musical notation. Across the exhibition, abstraction becomes a language for navigating sensory experience, memory and human connection.