Adrienne Outlaw is a St. Louis-based sculptor and public artist whose work asks what holds us up and what we owe in return.  Working with found materials, she uses accumulation, suspension, and balance to make connections both seen and felt. Her studio sculptures test the forces that hold individual parts together, often revealing a gap between how support looks and how it actually works. From her earliest sculptures to her current studio and public projects, questions of responsibility and interdependence have remained central. 

Her public works carry these questions into shared space through participation, gathering, and collective making. Through Make Waves, her national artist-led initiative, Outlaw brings communities and institutions together to build large-scale sculptural environments from post-consumer plastic. The material's convenience contrasts with the time and cooperation required to collect and assemble it. Since 2024, Make Waves installations have been presented six times in four cities, at a museum campus, an airport, and art fairs and festivals, most in outdoor public parks.

Outlaw's social practice includes organizing exhibitions, residencies, and artist-led spaces that bring artists, writers, curators, and audiences together. She founded Seed Space in Nashville and co-founded Red Gate in St. Louis, and has organized traveling and citywide exhibitions involving artists from across the United States and internationally.

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. Joe Nolan's Nowville, a history of Nashville's contemporary art scene, documents her broader practice.

Outlaw's 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.