ADAMA Announces 2026 Flowers & Seeds Honorees Lynn Marshall Linnemeier and Ayana Ross
ADAMA Announces 2026 Flowers & Seeds Honorees Lynn Marshall Linnemeier and Ayana Ross
Joint Exhibition to Open February 21 – May 2
Atlanta, GA — ADAMA is proud to announce that visual artists Lynn Marshall Linnemeier and Ayana Ross have been named the 2026 Flowers & Seeds honorees. In celebration of their recognition, ADAMA will present a joint exhibition featuring both artists from February 21 through May 2, opening in conjunction with the annual Flowers & Seeds Gala.
Flowers & Seeds honors artists across generations whose work embodies both enduring legacy and forward momentum. The 2026 honorees represent that continuum with depth and clarity.
For more than four decades, Lynn Marshall Linnemeier has developed an interdisciplinary practice centered on memory, place, and African American cultural history. Working across photography, mixed media, and site-specific installation, her work engages ancestral memory as both subject and method. Her projects often unfold in collaboration with communities and institutions, reflecting a sustained commitment to publicly engaged art.
Linnemeier’s major commissions include Journey to Freedom: Women of the Civil Rights Movement, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and recognized with the Atlanta Urban Design Commission’s Award of Excellence for Public Works of Art. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. After more than 40 years living and working in Atlanta, she now resides in Red Springs, North Carolina, where she continues developing site-responsive, community-centered projects.
Ayana Ross (b. 1977, Savannah, GA) lives and works in the metro Atlanta area. Her paintings combine traditional oil methods and figurative realism with ornamentation as a visual language, elevating her subjects while constructing layered narratives rooted in nostalgia, intergenerational memory, and cultural history.
Ross is the 2021 Bennett Prize winner, a 2024 Mellon Arts and Practitioner Fellow through Yale University’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, a 2025 Atlanta Artadia Awardee, and a 2024–2025 Working Artist Project Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including solo exhibitions at the Muskegon Museum of Art and the Reading Public Museum.
The joint exhibition will place Linnemeier’s decades-long engagement with ancestral memory and site in dialogue with Ross’s richly layered figurative practice. Together, their work reflects a shared commitment to honoring history while shaping new visual futures.
“Flowers & Seeds exists to recognize artistic lineage,” said [Insert ADAMA Representative Name & Title]. “Lynn’s lifetime of work has cultivated space for collective remembrance, while Ayana’s practice boldly expands representation for the present and future. Their pairing embodies continuity.”
The exhibition opens February 21 and runs through May 2 at ADAMA. Additional programming and public engagement events will be announced in the coming weeks.
For more information about the exhibition and the Flowers & Seeds Gala, visit www.adamatl.org.