News / Derrick Adams / 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.