Casey Kaplan
Igshaan Adams: I’ve been here all along, I’ve been waiting, opens on September 16, 2025 at the Hill Art Foundation, with accompanying text by Siddhartha Mitter and booklet designed by Pacific. This solo exhibition brings together work from over 15 years of Adams’ oeuvre, illustrating his prolonged commitment to serving and engaging his community as a form of artistic and spiritual expression. The exhibition will be on display through December 20, 2025.
Throughout I’ve been here all along, I’ve been waiting, Adams’ journey of spiritual discovery is on view, prompted by continuous individual reflection and community engagement. For the first time in a public exhibition, the rose is a central and recurring motif, marking over a decade of exploration. For Adams, the rose represents inherent contradictions: beauty and pain, ephemerality and rootedness, depth and surface. He traces the symbolism back to his mentor and Sufi master, Ma Rukea, who guided a young Adams as he grappled with his religious and personal upbringing. Ma Rukea referenced the rose as a metaphoric veil—its physical beauty acts as a façade for a hidden grace that remains unseen. The true essence of the rose is waiting to be uncovered, experienced, and known—lessons that have informed Adams’ spiritual and artistic development as he seeks to, in his words, “serve God through people.” Within the exhibition, heavily embellished floor- and wall-mounted rose tapestries are accompanied by intimate preparatory drawings, which transport the viewer into a mode of study, observation, and reflection.
In organizing I’ve been here all along, I’ve been waiting, Adams has taken full advantage of the Foundation’s double-height space and interstitial areas. The exhibition incorporates over 20 works, from hanging tapestries to free-standing sculpture to ephemeral masses—evocative of dust clouds kicked up by movement—suspended from the ceiling. These dynamic flurries of wire, beads, and found objects punctuate the vertical space of the Hill Art Foundation, creating a landscape populated with irregular forms that both obscure and bear witness to the community shaped by the artist and the viewer.
The Foundation will host an opening on Tuesday, September 16 from 6 pm – 8pm.
Read the full press release here.