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John Ottis Adams, born July 8, 1851, at Amity, Indiana, studied at the South Kensington School of Art in London (1872–74) and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (1880–85), and became a founding figure of the Hoosier Group of Indiana painters. His Fort Wayne tie is a foundational one: from 1887, while living in Muncie, Adams commuted to Fort Wayne to teach night art classes — the teaching that seeded the Fort Wayne Art School, which opened in 1888 above a downtown drugstore. The WPA's Indiana: A Guide to the Hoosier State (1941), in its account of the school, lists Adams among its early instructors alongside William Forsyth and Homer G. Davisson.
Adams went on to serve as a chief instructor at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. His painting Hollyhocks and Poppies — The Hermitage (1901) is held by the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. He died on January 28, 1927.
Sources: Encyclopedia of Indianapolis; J. Ottis Adams Papers, Indianapolis Museum of Art archives; WPA, Indiana: A Guide to the Hoosier State (1941), Fort Wayne section.