Derrick Adams

Derrick Adams is an American multidisciplinary artist who celebrates and broadens the discourse surrounding contemporary Black life and culture.

Biography of Derrick Adams

Derrick Adams was born in Baltimore in 1970 and is based in New York. He received his BFA from Pratt University, New York, in 1996 and completed an MFA from Columbia University, New York, in 2003. He has taken on various teaching roles and holds a tenured assistant professorship at CUNY Brooklyn College's School of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts.

Adams's public art projects include "Around the Way" (2019), a commission by MTA Arts & Design at the LIRR Nostrand Avenue Station in Brooklyn. Comprising eighty-five panels in vibrant colored glass, the artwork blends figures with natural and architectural elements to convey the diversity of the neighborhood. In 2021, he completed "Our Time Together," a panoramic ninety-three-foot mural and sculptural installation at the Milwaukee Art Museum, portraying places of intergenerational gathering in the city's Black community.

In 2022, Adams established "Charm City Cultural Cultivation," an organization dedicated to supporting underserved communities in Baltimore. This organization operates through three entities: "The Last Resort Artist Retreat," a residency program emphasizing leisure as a form of therapy for Black creatives; "The Black Baltimore Digital Database," a collaborative platform for archiving and preserving local historical data; and "Zora's Den," an online community of Black women writers initiated in January 2017, which has expanded to include in-person writing workshops, a writers' circle, and a monthly reading series, all aimed at promoting education, support, and community engagement.

Adams's art is part of the collections of institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, among others.

Derrick Adams's Art Style

Derrick Adams's multidisciplinary practice encompasses paintings, sculptures, collages, performances, videos, and public projects, where he combines representational imagery with planar Cubist geometry to create multifaceted figures and faces that explore the depth of the Black experience.

One of his notable works is "Sanctuary," a mixed-media installation that draws inspiration from The Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual guidebook for Black American travelers during a time when racial discrimination was open and often legally prescribed. "Sanctuary" reimagines safe and welcoming destinations for Black travelers in the mid-twentieth century.

In his "Floaters" paintings (2016–20), Adams portrays Black individuals relaxing in the water on inflatable objects, suggesting that respite itself is a political act when embraced by Black communities. This concept led to "Funtime Unicorns" (2022), a whimsical installation at New York's Rockefeller Center featuring rideable playground unicorns. His ongoing "Style Variation" paintings depict mannequin heads adorned with wigs as a tribute to the transformative power of personal style and self-expression.

The "Motion Picture Paintings" series (2020–22) combines references to movies, music, and everyday observations. By juxtaposing stylized figures and evocative text in cinematic compositions, Adams's paintings delve into how Black culture is both lived and imagined and how art shapes identity.