Born in Holywood, Northern Ireland (with the name William Allen Adams), Tate Adams (1922–2018) moved to Australia (the home of his wife's family) in 1952, where he became one of the country's most acclaimed printmakers. He studied at the Central School of Art in London, 1949–50, under the British printmaker Gertrude Hermes, where he learnt the technique of woodcut in particular.
His first exhibition was in Northern Ireland in 1949, a joint show with Gerard Dillon organised by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and Arts. During World War Two, Adams served as a draftsman with the British Admiralty and was transferred to Ceylon, where he is said to have made friends with a Buddhist monk and the two painted and visited galleries together. Several of Adams's Ceylon works were exhibited at his first exhibition.
After moving to Australia in 1952, he briefly returned to Ireland in 1959 to spend a year working voluntarily with Liam Miller of Dolmen Press. Back in Australia in 1960, he established the artist print department at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where he taught for twenty-two years. His students included George Baldessin, Elizabeth Cross and Graeme Peebles. In 1966, he established Crossley Gallery, the only commercial gallery in Australia devoted exclusively to printmaking, and in 1977, together with Baldessin, he established Lyre Bird Press to publish high calibre livres d’artistes. Adams is widely acknowledged as both improving printmaking technical standards and developing printmaking as a respected art form.
Tate Adams's highly imaginative work often contains a narrative element, whilst also featuring the flattened forms associated with modernist printmaking. He is considered amongst the group of modern artists known as the Belfast Boys, and his work featured in the 2015 exhibition in Dublin, George Campbell and the Belfast Boys, alongside Gerard Dillon and Daniel O'Neill.
