Clinton Adams, artist, author, teacher, scholar, and lecturer, was born in Glendale, California on December 11, 1918. He earned a B.A. in education and a M.A. in 1942 from the University of California Los Angeles and began teaching there in 1946. He also taught at the Otis Art Institute and went on to head the art departments at both the University of Kentucky and the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Adams was introduced to Lynton Kistler in 1948 and began producing lithographs in his commercial print shop in Los Angeles. In 1959, he joined forces with artist June Wayne and the Tamarind Lithography Workshop was founded in Los Angeles in 1960 with Adams as associate director. He moved to Albuquerque in 1961 after accepting the position as dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. Tamarind moved to Albuquerque in 1970 and Adams became the Institute's director—a position he held for fifteen years. He was very active as a writer, authoring numerous articles and books on lithography, including The Tamarind Book of Lithography: Art & Techniques, American Lithographers 1900-1960, and Printmaking in New Mexico 1880-1990 published in 1991.

Adams had more than thirty solo exhibitions and his work is represented in the collections of the British Museum, London; the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Harvard Art Museums; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Los Angeles; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth; the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; and the Brooklyn Museum.

Clinton Adams died in Albuquerque, New Mexico on May 13, 2002.