DERRICK ADAMS

Derrick Adams is a Brooklyn–based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, and sound installations. His multidisciplinary practice engages the ways in which individuals’ ideals, aspirations, and personas become attached to specific objects, colors, textures, symbols, and ideologies.

His work probes the influence of popular culture on the formation of self-image, and the relationship between man and monument as they coexist and embody one another. Adams is also deeply immersed in questions of how African American experiences intersect with art history, American iconography, and consumerism.

ABOUT THE WORK:

Adams’ Floater series depicts Black figures at rest and at play enjoying summer beach and pool days, positing that respite itself is a political act. His work often explores Black identity and culture especially through the lens of joy and play as both a right and as resistance. His series of bathers floating with pool toys  are relaxed and unrushed, conjuring memories of summers past and encouraging us to dream of new futures. By embracing the representation of Black joy and rest, Adams pushes against the mainstream desires to reproduce images of Black suffering or activism. The artist is quoted as saying, “Malcolm and Martin went to the beach too.”