Bruce Adams was many things to the Western New York community: artist, teacher, mentor, writer, adviser, husband, father, and friend. He was also involved in the humanist movement with the Center for Inquiry (CFI), copublisher of Free Inquiry.
Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1952, Adams was the oldest of six children and attended school in the area, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1972 and his master’s in art education in 1982. He began teaching at a local high school in 1979, retiring in 2009, at which time he began lecturing at Buffalo State College until 2019.
In addition to teaching, Adams produced his own artwork over the years, including exhibitions both locally and internationally. His work is part of the collections at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Burchfield Penney Art Center, and the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University, among other Western New York institutions. Adams’s original artwork graced the covers of many issues of Free Inquiry as well as its sister magazine, the Skeptical Inquirer.
Adams also wrote columns for Buffalo Spree magazine and was an art reviewer for the Buffalo News from 2001 to 2004. He wrote a feature article for FI for the October/November 2017 issue titled “The Artful Blasphemer.”
Beyond art, Adams had an immense range of interests, from philosophy to music, magic, and fencing, but most closely related to FI was his interest in skepticism, rationalism, and humanism. On his website he stated,
I was probably born a skeptic. Fortunately for me, the Buffalo area is a hotbed of rational thinking, the international Center for Inquiry. CFI is a global federation committed to science, reason, free inquiry, secularism, and planetary ethics. Under this organization’s rather large umbrella is published Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer, two of my favorite magazines.
Adams chaired the review committee when CFI conducted an international sculpture contest that resulted in “Quo Vadis” (2007), a modernist pipe sculpture that stands next to the main entrance at CFI headquarters in Amherst, New York.
Adams died March 5, 2021, after living and working with cancer since October 2020, according to a posting on the Facebook page of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
In addition to his wife, Renee Rapp, survivors include two sons, a brother, four sisters, and a grandchild.
According to Hallwalls’s website, in addition to a special event in his memory this spring, there will continue to be retrospective exhibitions of his art over the next year and a half in various galleries.
Free Inquiry and the Center for Inquiry thank Bruce Adams for his many years of support and donations of artwork.