Adrienne Outlaw is a St. Louis-based sculptor and public artist whose work asks what holds us up and what we owe ourselves and one another. For more than thirty years, she has built sculpture from found materials, using accumulation, joining, suspension, and balance to make connection both seen and felt. In the studio, Outlaw tests the forces that hold individual parts together, often revealing a gap between how support looks and how it actually works. 

Her public works carry these questions into shared space through participation, gathering, and collective making. Through Make Waves, her national artist-led initiative, Outlaw partners with river cities to build large-scale sculptural environments from community-collected post-consumer plastic. Since 2024, these works have been presented in four cities, across art fairs, festivals, an airport, and a museum campus.

Outlaw's practice also extends into exhibitions and spaces she creates to bring artists, writers, curators, and audiences together. She founded Seed Space in Nashville and co-founded Red Gate in St. Louis. She has brought her work into dialogue with national and international artists by organizing traveling and city-wide exhibitions and creating artist residencies.

Institutions including the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Washington University School of Medicine, Cheekwood Museum of Art, St. Louis Lambert International Airport, the Tennessee State Museum, and Vanderbilt University have commissioned or collected her work. 

Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, Sculpture, Art Papers, and World Sculpture News. Critical writing on her projects includes exhibition catalog texts by Michelle Grabner, Mary Jane Jacob, Nato Thompson, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Linda Weintraub. Her writing appears in Sharon Louden's Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, and Joe Nolan's Nowville, a history of Nashville's contemporary art scene, documents her broader practice. 

Her projects have received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Creative Capital recognized her work in its On Our Radar program.