Turiya Adkins (b. 1998, New York, US) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn. She received her BA from Dartmouth College in 2020. Adkins then went on to work as a teaching assistant for the Studio Art department at Dartmouth. She is currently based in Brooklyn, where she works as a studio assistant screen-printing for Julie Mehretu while pursuing and developing her own practice with ferocity.

Adkins' recent works explore resistance through Black athletes in track and field and themes of supernatural flight in African folklore. She combines personal family archives and historical research, connecting her grandfather's role as a track coach with the Fugitive Slave Act and the Great Migration. Her work also reflects on her great uncle, a Tuskegee Airman, drawing parallels between the aspirational flight of Black pilots in WWII and the symbolic flight of enslaved Africans escaping slavery in America.

“I find liberation in abstraction. Traditional figuration fails to capture the true complexity of an emotion, situation, or experience. I combat this through gestural mark-making to bring form to feeling. I use specific imagery to start a conversation between the vast and amorphous abstract and the decipherable truth of recognition.”

Recently, her work has been the subject of a solo exhibition at Hannah Traore Gallery, New York, US (2024). She has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Helmut Lang Seen by Antwaun Sargent, Hannah Traore Gallery, New York, US (2023); Manifold (Deluxe), Frieze Cork Street, London, UK (2023); Parallels and Rupture, Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, US (2023); Manifold, London, UK (2022); and Experience 49: blue/s, El Segundo Museum of Art, Los Angeles, US (2021).