About
What can I reveal that has not been shown? Black people—not entertaining, just being, living. Letting people deal with that as reality.
—Derrick Adams
Derrick Adams celebrates and expands the dialogue around contemporary Black life and culture through scenes of normalcy and perseverance. He has developed an iconography of joy, leisure, and the pursuit of happiness with a multidisciplinary practice that encompasses paintings, sculptures, collages, performances, videos, and public projects. Adams synthesizes representational imagery with planar Cubist geometry to produce multifaceted figures and faces that address the richness of the Black experience.
Born in Baltimore in 1970, Adams lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from Pratt University, New York, in 1996 and graduated with an MFA from Columbia University, New York, in 2003. Adams has held numerous teaching positions and is currently a tenured assistant professor in the School of Visual, Media and Performing Arts at CUNY Brooklyn College.
His installation Sanctuary was first exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, in 2018. Inspired by The Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual guidebook for Black American road-trippers during an era when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against non-white people was widespread. The mixed-media installation reimagines safe destinations of relaxation and leisure for the Black American traveler during the mid-twentieth century.
Photo: Emil Horowitz
#DerrickAdams
Website
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2023
The Fall 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Derrick Adams’s Everything and a Ring (2023) on its cover.
Come As You Are: Derrick Adams
Jewels Dodson visited artist Derrick Adams at his New York studio as he prepared for an exhibition of new paintings in Los Angeles in the fall of 2023. She reports on these works and on Adams’s embrace of joy, humor, and contradiction.
In Conversation
Amanda Williams and Derrick Adams
On the occasion of her exhibition Amanda Williams: CANDYLADYBLACK at Gagosian in New York, the artist spoke with artist Derrick Adams about the way she uses color as a tool to examine the complex ways in which race informs our assignment of value to physical, social, and conceptual spaces.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Art Fair
Frieze Los Angeles 2024
Social Abstraction
March 1–3, 2024, booth D13
Santa Monica Airport, California
frieze.com
Gagosian is pleased to announce its participation in Frieze Los Angeles 2024 with Social Abstraction, a diverse selection of paintings and sculptures rooted in the exploration of historic qualities of abstraction and contemporary social realities. The first in a sequence of three presentations organized by Antwaun Sargent, Social Abstraction at Frieze Los Angeles will be followed by exhibitions in Beverly Hills this summer and in Hong Kong this fall.
The intergenerational group of Black artists in Social Abstraction—Derrick Adams, Theaster Gates, Cy Gavin, Lauren Halsey, and Rick Lowe—operates beyond purely formal concerns to create artworks that move between and beyond figuration and abstraction. They push shape to become landscape, color to reveal people, and texture to map the totality of experience.
Gagosian’s booth at Frieze Los Angeles 2024. Artwork, front to back: © Lauren Halsey, © Cy Gavin, © Theaster Gates. Photo: Ed Mumford
Public Installation
Derrick Adams
Moynihan Connector Billboard
January 11–April 22, 2024
High Line, New York
www.thehighline.org
Sitting Pretty and Sing It Like You Mean It (both 2016) by Derrick Adams are on view on the High Line’s Moynihan Connector Billboard at its location on Dyer Avenue between 30th and 31st Streets in New York. The double-sided billboard features Adams’s two commanding depictions of Black people, whose warm self-assurance is broadcast to the park visitors and passersby below. The figures on each side are set against the Technicolor backdrop of a television test card, suggesting the partial reset of conventions within popular culture that took place as Black culture gained greater representation in the latter part of the twentieth century. A public park built on a once-abandoned elevated rail line in Manhattan, the High Line is also a nonprofit organization that works with communities and reimagines public spaces to create connected, healthy neighborhoods and cities.
Derrick Adams, Sing It Like You Mean It, 2016, installation view, High Line, New York © Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: courtesy High Line, New York
Installation
Derrick Adams
Dewdrop Inn
December 3, 2023–Fall 2026
Baltimore Museum of Art
artbma.org
Derrick Adams’s Dewdrop Inn (2023) has been installed at the Baltimore Museum of Art as part of the reopening of the Patricia and Mark Joseph Education Center, which offers new opportunities for hands-on art making and engagement for families, students, and art lovers of all ages. The installation, which features a match-up card game designed by the artist, invites young museumgoers to interact with one another and learn about the museum’s rich collection of African American art.
Derrick Adams, Dewdrop Inn, 2023 © Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: Maximilian Franz
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Multiplicity
Blackness in Contemporary American Collage
Through May 12, 2024
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
www.mfah.org
Multiplicity presents over eighty major collage and collage-informed works by fifty-two living artists. The works reflect the breadth and complexity of Black identity, exploring diverse conceptual concerns such as cultural hybridity, notions of beauty, gender fluidity, and historical memory. From paper, photographs, fabric, and salvaged or repurposed materials, these artists create unified compositions that express the endless possibilities of Black-constructed narratives within our fragmented society. This exhibition originated at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Work by Derrick Adams, Lauren Halsey, and Rick Lowe is included.
Lauren Halsey, Loda Land, 2020 © Lauren Halsey
On View
Derrick Adams
Future People . . . Take Off
Through May 25, 2024
PES FUTURES, New York
www.pesfutures.org
Derrick Adams’s exhibition Future People . . . Take Off, an imagined environment meditating on past, present, and future ideas of Black culture, Futurism, and African roots, is the inaugural presentation in the PES FUTURES program. Sited in Project for Empty Space’s new headquarters, PES FUTURES is a space for artists interested in the realization of parallel and intersecting potentialities and the possibility to claim and reclaim space through their work. Inspired by the Afrofuturist movement, Adams’s installation incorporates images, video, and music.
Derrick Adams, Orbiting Us 1, 2017 © Derrick Adams Studio
On View
Giants
Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys
Through July 7, 2024
Brooklyn Museum, New York
www.brooklynmuseum.org
Giants, the first major exhibition of the Dean Collection, owned by musical icons Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys, showcases a focused selection from the couple’s world-class holdings and spotlights works by Black diasporic artists. Expansive in their collecting habits, the Deans, both born and raised in New York, champion a philosophy of “artists supporting artists.” “Giants” refers to the renown of legendary artists, the impact of canon-expanding contemporary figures, and some of the monumental works in the collection. Work by Derrick Adams, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Titus Kaphar, and Deana Lawson is included.
Derrick Adams, Woman in Grayscale (Alicia), 2017 © Derrick Adams Studio
On View
Effetto Notte
Nuovo Realismo Americano
Through July 14, 2024
Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome
barberinicorsini.org
This exhibition’s title was borrowed from a work by Lorna Simpson, Day for Night (2018), which translates to Effetto Notte in Italian. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Flaminia Gennari Santori in collaboration with the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, the exhibition features more than 150 artworks from the collection of Tony and Elham Salamé that interrogate the meanings and functions of figuration in contemporary art and address questions around the notion of realism and the representation of truth in painting. Work by Derrick Adams, Louise Bonnet, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Theaster Gates, Duane Hanson, Rick Lowe, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sterling Ruby, Anna Weyant, Stanley Whitney, and Christopher Wool is included.
Richard Prince, Untitled, 2015, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut © Richard Prince