Notable artist and emeritus faculty member Mac Adams recently returned to campus to showcase his work for students and the community through “Actus Reus,” the latest exhibition at the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery.
A full-time member of the SUNY Old Westbury Visual Arts Department for 30 years, Adams rose to the rank of distinguished teaching professor, among the highest available in the SUNY system, before his retirement in 2018.
“Actus Reus” is a Latin reference for “guilty act,” referring to the physical deed that constitutes a crime. The exhibit reflects Adams’ decades-long engagement with crime narratives, evidence, and ambiguity. It includes works selected from his past major series: “Mysteries,” “The Shadow,” “Modern Tragedies,” “The Eye of Rodin,” and his most recent series “American Pastoral.”
As his newest works, “American Pastoral” features fictional scenes of contemporary America constructed through the use of artificial intelligence where pipelines, detention infrastructure, and suburban developments appear as plausible realities rather than documentary records.
"I hope people get to learn how to analytically look at images and deconstruct them," Adams said during the opening reception at the gallery on September 9, 2026. "The work that has my attention now is the new AI work, the people at the opening seemed to grasp the content, which made me happy."
Across his academic and artistic career, he has won a New York State University Chancellors Research Award for Excellence in Arts and Humanities, a New York State Fellowship for the Arts for Sculpture and several National Endowment for the Arts awards during his career.
Adams has created art for over 40 years and is known for his innovative use of light and shadow with his exhibits shown in London, Paris, Toronto, Canada, China and Osaka, Japan. His work, done as sculptures and photos, is in collections in such places as the Museum of Modern Art, the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Guggenheim Museum in New York to London's Victoria and Albert Museum and even by Microsoft who purchased several pieces of his work for their art collection. He designed the New York Korean War Memorial entitled “Universal Soldier,” which was installed in Battery Park in 1991.
The exhibition, running at the Wallace Gallery through October 9, 2026, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, “Mac Adams: Actus Reus,” featuring an essay by renowned photography historian Michel Frizot. The catalog was designed by Nathan Brutzman and produced with support from OW STEAM. For information about purchasing a copy of the catalog, send an email to Gallery Director Hyewon Yi or call 516-876-2709/3056.