Events
Exhibition
Derrick Adams in
Beyond Granite: Pulling Together
August 18–September 18, 2023
National Mall, Washington, DC
monumentlab.com
Beyond Granite: Pulling Together aims to create a more inclusive, equitable, and representative commemorative landscape on the National Mall. Curated by Monument Lab, a nonprofit public art and history studio based in Philadelphia, the exhibition features installations by six artists that respond to its central question: What stories remain untold on the National Mall? The innovative and experimental works explore Indigenous legacies, histories of enslavement, civil rights, LGBTQ activism, pathways for immigration, environmental justice, and other defining narratives of American resilience. America’s Playground: DC (2023), a monumental structure by Derrick Adams that considers the history of desegregated playgrounds in the nation’s capital, is included.
Derrick Adams, America’s Playground: DC, 2023 © Derrick Adams Studio
Fundraiser
Artist Plate Project 2022
Coalition for the Homeless
Launching May 22, 2023, 10am edt
Limited-edition bone china plates produced by Prospect and featuring artwork by more than forty artists—including Virgil Abloh, Derrick Adams, Harold Ancart, Georg Baselitz, Amoako Boafo, Mark Grotjahn, Takashi Murakami, Albert Oehlen, Ed Ruscha, Anna Weyant, and Jonas Wood—will be sold through Artware Editions to raise funds for the Coalition’s lifesaving programs. The funds raised by the sale of the plates will provide food, crisis services, housing, and other critical aid to thousands of people experiencing homelessness and instability. The purchase of one plate can feed one hundred homeless and hungry New Yorkers.
Takashi Murakami, Gargantua on Your Palm, 2018 © 2018 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved
Public Installation
Derrick Adams
Art on the Mart
April 14–July 5, 2023, 8:30pm daily
The Mart, Chicago
artonthemart.com
Art on the Mart, an innovative digital art project that transforms the Chicago architectural landmark into a larger-than-life canvas, will initiate its 2023 programming with a new work by Derrick Adams. Titled Funtime Unicorn: Ruby Rides Through Four Seasons (2023), the animation builds upon Adams’s whimsical Funtime Unicorn project, which celebrates Black joy, love, and play. Featuring a display of colorful backgrounds and light tunnels across the façade of the Mart, the ten-minute piece will be on view each night at 8:30pm for one hour. Realized in collaboration with the graphic design studio the Channel, the work features an original score, background vocals, and story narration by Cleo Reed, alongside original music by trumpeter Dave Guy of the Roots.
Derrick Adam’s Funtime Unicorn: Ruby Rides Through Four Seasons (2023) on the façade of the Mart, Chicago. Artwork © Derrick Adams. Photo: courtesy Art on the Mart
Commission
Derrick Adams
Art at Amtrak – New York Penn Station
Amtrak has commissioned Derrick Adams to create an expansive new work for Art at Amtrak, a program that invites artists from New York and New Jersey to produce original art specifically for Penn Station in New York City. The installation, titled The City Is My Refuge (2023), which marks the first time that a single artist has taken over the entire concourse level of the station, is on view from January 19 through June 2023. Adams, a frequent rider of Amtrak between New York and Baltimore, created the installation to highlight the wonders of the urban environment available to residents and visitors alike. He reframes the city as a place where the natural world shares space with humanity, and as somewhere one can find peace and joy.
Derrick Adams standing in his installation The City Is My Refuge (2023) at New York’s Penn Station. Artwork © Derrick Adams Studio
Commission
On Site: Derrick Adams
Our Time Together
On Site: Derrick Adams features a multimedia wall mural and sculptural installation made specifically for the Milwaukee Art Museum’s East End, on view from October 29, 2021, through 2024. Inspired by Victor Hugo Green’s The Negro Motorist Green Book (1936–66), a travel guide for Black Americans during the Jim Crow era, Adams celebrates the rituals of everyday Black life and leisure. The monumental wall mural, titled Our Time Together (2021), includes references to Milwaukee institutions Gee’s Clippers, Coffee Makes You Black, and the Wisconsin Black Historical Society, as well as photographs from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Derrick Adams, Our Time Together, 2021, installation view, Milwaukee Art Museum © Derrick Adams Studio
Announcements
New Representation
Derrick Adams
Gagosien is pleased to announce the global representation of Derrick Adams. The gallery’s debut exhibition of new paintings by Adams will be presented in Beverly Hills in September 2023.
Adams’s paintings, sculptures, collages, performances, videos, and public projects celebrate and expand 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. Adams’s distinctive style synthesizes representational imagery with planar Cubist geometry to produce multifaceted figures and faces that address the richness of the Black experience.
Photo: Emil Horowitz
Museum Exhibitions
Just Opened
Multiplicity
Blackness in Contemporary American Collage
Through December 31, 2023
Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee
fristartmuseum.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. Work by Derrick Adams and Rick Lowe is included.
Derrick Adams, Floater 108, 2020 © Derrick Adams Studio
On View
Derrick Adams in
Black California Dreamin’: Claiming Space at America’s Leisure Frontier
Through March 31, 2024
California African American Museum, Los Angeles
caamuseum.org
Black California Dreamin’ illuminates the work undertaken by Angelenos and other Californians to make leisure an open, inclusive reality in the first half of the twentieth century. In shaping recreational sites and public spaces during the Jim Crow era, African Americans challenged white supremacy and situated Black identity within oceanfront and inland social gathering places throughout California. The exhibition includes historical photographs and memorabilia alongside contemporary artworks. Work by Derrick Adams is included.
Derrick Adams, Floater 60, 2017 © Derrick Adams Studio
Closed
Derrick Adams in
Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing
June 24–September 4, 2023
The Church, Sag Harbor, New York
www.thechurchsagharbor.org
Copresented with FLAG Art Foundation, New York, Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing, is a two-venue group exhibition that centers on the psychology, ethos, and spectacle of boxing. It explores the sport as both theme and metaphor, together with its complex and multifaceted cultural meanings. The exhibition includes ancient, modern, and contemporary artworks, as well as newly commissioned pieces and boxing-related ephemera. Work by Derrick Adams is included.
Installation view, Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing, The Church, Sag Harbor, New York, June 24–September 4, 2023. Artwork, left to right: © Derrick Adams Studio, © William King. Photo: Gary Mamay
Closed
Order / Reorder
Experiments with Collections
June 17, 2022–September 3, 2023
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York
www.hrm.org
Order / Reorder: Experiments with Collections examines ways to look at American art that consider expressions of American identity from new perspectives. The works on view range across genres: portraiture, figural studies, still life, landscape, and abstraction. Rather than following a chronological structure, the installation aims to spark discussion through juxtaposing styles, outlooks, and eras. Work by Derrick Adams and Tom Wesselmann is included.
Derrick Adams, Self-Portrait on Float, 2019, Hudson River Museum © Derrick Adams Studio/Tandem Press, Madison, Wisconsin
Closed
The Culture
Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century
April 5–July 16, 2023
Baltimore Museum of Art
artbma.org
Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of hip-hop, this exhibition aims to capture the influence the genre has had on contemporary society through more than ninety works. Including painting, sculpture, photography, installations, video, and fashion, the show is organized around six themes—language, brand, adornment, tribute, ascension, and pose. Work by Derrick Adams, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Deana Lawson is included.
Derrick Adams, Heir to the Throne, 2021 © Derrick Adams Studio
Closed
Derrick Adams
I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You
January 13–March 11, 2023
FLAG Art Foundation, New York
www.flagartfoundation.org
I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You, a solo exhibition by Derrick Adams, comprises a cycle of sixteen large-scale works from the artist’s new series Motion Picture Paintings (2020–22). The works extend his signature deconstructed, cubist-style portraits in a new cinematic direction. Freeze-framed moments—drawn from movies, media, and the artist’s imagination—are emblazoned with a variety of graphic texts reminiscent of film titles.
Installation view, Derrick Adams: I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, January 13–March 11, 2023. Artwork © Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: Steven Probert
Closed
Derrick Adams
LOOKS
December 5, 2021–May 29, 2022
Cleveland Museum of Art
www.clevelandart.org
The wig shops in Derrick Adams’s Brooklyn neighborhood inspired the nine monumental paintings of wigs on mannequin heads shown in LOOKS. The works do not present generic mannequin heads—instead the geometry of the faces is individualized with varied skin tones and makeup to complement the attitudes projected by the different wigs. The artist views self-adornment as powerful. The larger-than-life scale and direct gaze of the heads allow them to command the gallery space. These paintings are about being seen—honoring spectacle, celebrating what the artist calls everyday “fantasticness,” and telegraphing power over one’s image.
Installation view, Derrick Adams: LOOKS, Cleveland Museum of Art, December 5, 2021–May 29, 2022. Artwork © Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: David A. Brichford