Derrick Adams

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 Institute, 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 associate professor in the School of Visual, Media and Performing Arts at CUNY Brooklyn College. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Maryland Institute College of Art.

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.