In a studio near Pinebrook, just outside Park City, Adam Himoff builds images line by line. From a distance, his work reads as portraiture: faces, figures, and symbols. Up close, those images dissolve into hundreds of individual marks: carved, painted, or cut lines layered to create pattern, movement, and depth.
Himoff refers to this approach simply as “line style.” The visual language grew out of early experiments in woodcut printmaking and a childhood spent immersed in New York City. The artist grew up in Manhattan just blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “I would go to the museum constantly and just wander the halls,” he recalls. “That was my backyard.” From an early age, he was influenced by master painters, modernists, impressionists, and expressionists, while also absorbing the graffiti and public art that defined the city in the 1980s and ’90s.
That combination of formal training and urban influence still shapes his work today. Across paintings, linocut prints, and laser-cut metal pieces, line functions as both structure and subject. Himoff describes the effect as an “uncanny filter” on the world, one that allows him to deconstruct familiar imagery and reconstruct it to offer viewers a new perspective. “You’re seeing something recognizable,” he says, “but not in the way you expect.”
Though art was central to his early life, Himoff did not follow a conventional path into the profession. At 13, he enrolled in figure-drawing classes at the Art Students League of New York and later attended summer programs at the Rhode Island School of Design. At Dartmouth College, he continued taking art classes while majoring in English literature.
After college, he built a career in finance and entrepreneurship, working in New York and Los Angeles before earning an MBA from UCLA Anderson. In 2013, he and his wife, also an artist, moved to Utah, where he launched and grew a Salt Lake City-based recruiting business.
The move was motivated in part by lifestyle. “We wanted to raise our daughters closer to nature,” he says. “Park City made sense.” Creatively, the shift proved significant. “I’ve always identified as a New Yorker,” Himoff continues. “There’s an intensity that never really goes away. But Park City gave me space to focus and think.”
The turning point came during the early months of the 2020 pandemic. With his business operating remotely, Himoff began carving linocut prints in a makeshift home studio. One of those works, a modernized portrait of Frederick Douglass, quickly gained national attention. The piece reimagined the 19th-century abolitionist in contemporary dress, rendered in Himoff’s line style and set against graffiti-inspired text.
Within days, the ACLU acquired the work for its permanent collection. Soon after, prints made their way to Easton, MD, where Douglass was born, and eventually became a 21-foot mural on the side of a historic building. The work later appeared on the exterior of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore.
“That experience made something very clear to me,” Himoff says. “Once art is out in the world, it takes on a life of its own. It starts conversations you can’t fully control.”
While the piece drew criticism from a small group who objected to its modernization of a historical figure, Himoff says the response ultimately clarified his responsibility as an artist: to engage viewers and ask questions rather than provide answers.
That approach now appears throughout his work in more subtle ways. In many recent pieces, words and lettering are woven directly into the image. In laser-cut metal portraits of women wearing helmets, phrases like Star Dust + Spit Fire and Rocket Girl are embedded in the steel lattice itself. In a painting of a woman with a snake, the phrase With Open Eyes is threaded into the geometry beneath the surface.
“It’s not always obvious at first, but it reveals itself over time,” Himoff explains, as he describes the hidden text as an intentional layering of meaning. “Truth is rarely simple,” he adds. “You have to work at it.”
Material experimentation is central to that goal. In addition to painting and printmaking, Himoff creates laser-cut steel works that function as both surface and structure. The pieces are part of an ongoing series titled May We Shine Like Stars. The name, which he has described as “a prayer of sorts,” reflects an exploration of the future that balances optimism about human potential with anxiety about what lies ahead.
Today, Himoff is beginning partnerships with galleries in California, including BG Gallery in Santa Monica. He continues to create commissioned work for private collectors and is developing a new community engagement project in collaboration with the Harriet Tubman Freedom Center in Cambridge, MD.
For Himoff, the transition into full-time artmaking feels less like a reinvention than a return. “It took me a long time to allow myself to do this fully,” he concludes. “But now it feels aligned. Like I’m finally using all the parts of my background in one place.”
