Adams's father was a stock raiser and amateur painter; thus, he was raised on a farm, but in an atmosphere conducive to his development as an artist. Adams's formal studies were under William Forsyth at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis from 1904 to 1909. In the summer of 1910, he was in the group led to Florence by William Merritt Chase; and in the summer of 1912, he was in Spain with another influential artistic guide, Robert Henri. Adams won his first significant professional recognition, the Thomas R. Proctor Prize, in the NAD Winter Exhibition of 1914. He received Altman prizes in the winter exhibitions of 1926 and 1932.
In the summer of 1918 he moved to New York where he took a studio in the Sherwood Building on Fifty-seventh Street. That same year he married Margaret Graham Boroughs of Austin, Texas. She was also an artist; the couple had met when both were pupils of Chase in Italy. Adams maintained a studio in Indianapolis and returned there almost yearly. He also owned a farm near Elizabethtown, New York, in the Adirondacks, where he conducted a summer school until 1948, when he moved to Texas. Adams also taught at the Grand Central School of Art, New York; at the John Herron Art Institute; and in Taxco, Mexico, where he lived in the 1930s.
Adams' specialty was portraiture. The movie Wayman Adams Paints a Portrait previewed in the American Art Today building at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
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