[5] Except for two years spent in France, Adams has lived in New York City, traveling for collaboration and consultation on public art projects in the United States and abroad.
The sculpture in this exhibition ran counter to the minimal "primary structures" of Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt, suggesting more intuitive and idiosyncratic approaches.
The work of women whose work related to the 1970s was organized into the exhibition "Decoys, Complexes and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s" in 2008 at the Sculpture Center in NYC and included Adams, Mary Miss, Nancy Holt, Jackie Ferrara, Alice Aycock, Agnes Denes, Michelle Stuart, Suzanne Harris and Lynda Benglis.
[15] Adams' site sculptures of the 1970s at venues like the Artpark and the Nassau County Museum of Art were commissioned and funded but, like many similar projects, temporary.
A commission for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey entitled "Glider Park," suspended seating under steel pavilions designed to incorporate the growth of the trees on the site.
Subsequently, precast and cast-in-place concrete structures started to appear as well as cast, etched, and fabricated, steel, bronze and aluminum and very often, water and plant material played major roles.
Two large outdoor meeting places on college campuses, The Roundabout in Center City Philadelphia and Scroll Circle at the University of Delaware, create major focal points.
Giant aluminum arches filled with multi-colored argon lean toward each other in "Beaded Circle Crossing" to span a moving walkway at the Denver International Airport.
A diagrammatic aluminum boat frame sits atop one of three large limestone and thick glass-clad planter platforms of the "Stone and Glass Gardens" on two levels of the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport.
As co-lead artist she and Marek Ranis wrote the art master plan and collaborated on the design of landscape and infrastructure components of the Charlotte (NC) Area Transit System (2002–2006).