Events
Public Installation
Derrick Adams
Moynihan Connector Billboard
January 11–April 22, 2024
High Line, New York
www.thehighline.org
Sitting Pretty and Sing It Like You Mean It (both 2016) by Derrick Adams are on view on the High Line’s Moynihan Connector Billboard at its location on Dyer Avenue between 30th and 31st Streets in New York. The double-sided billboard features Adams’s two commanding depictions of Black people, whose warm self-assurance is broadcast to the park visitors and passersby below. The figures on each side are set against the Technicolor backdrop of a television test card, suggesting the partial reset of conventions within popular culture that took place as Black culture gained greater representation in the latter part of the twentieth century. A public park built on a once-abandoned elevated rail line in Manhattan, the High Line is also a nonprofit organization that works with communities and reimagines public spaces to create connected, healthy neighborhoods and cities.
Derrick Adams, Sing It Like You Mean It, 2016, installation view, High Line, New York © Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: courtesy High Line, New York
Installation
Derrick Adams
Dewdrop Inn
December 3, 2023–Fall 2026
Baltimore Museum of Art
artbma.org
Derrick Adams’s Dewdrop Inn (2023) has been installed at the Baltimore Museum of Art as part of the reopening of the Patricia and Mark Joseph Education Center, which offers new opportunities for hands-on art making and engagement for families, students, and art lovers of all ages. The installation, which features a match-up card game designed by the artist, invites young museumgoers to interact with one another and learn about the museum’s rich collection of African American art.
Derrick Adams, Dewdrop Inn, 2023 © Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: Maximilian Franz
Shop Takeover
Derrick Adams
RECESS
Opening reception: Tuesday, October 10, 6–8pm
October 2–November 6, 2023
Gagosian Shop, London
Derrick Adams is taking over the Gagosian Shop in London’s Burlington Arcade with a selection of new merchandise designed with imagery of recreation, self-reflection, and sweet treats. Offerings include T-shirts adorned with icons from his paintings as well as a poster produced in conjunction with Come as You Are, his exhibition at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. The Fall 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly, with a cover image by Adams and a feature by Jewels Dodson reflecting on the artist’s recent works, is also available.
The Shop takeover accompanies RECESS, an exhibition of new work in the gallery upstairs that includes a painting and a video whose imagery relate to Adams’s interactive sculptures Funtime Unicorn Spring Riders (2022), which are installed in the gallery and along the length of the historic arcade.
Derrick Adams takeover at the Gagosian Shop, London, 2023. Artwork © Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
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
Announcements
New Representation
Derrick Adams
Gagosian 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
Effetto Notte
Nuovo Realismo Americano
Through July 14, 2024
Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome
barberinicorsini.org
This exhibition’s title was borrowed from a work by Lorna Simpson, Day for Night (2018), which translates to Effetto Notte in Italian. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Flaminia Gennari Santori in collaboration with the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, the exhibition features more than 150 artworks from the collection of Tony and Elham Salamé that interrogate the meanings and functions of figuration in contemporary art and address questions around the notion of realism and the representation of truth in painting. Work by Derrick Adams, Louise Bonnet, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Theaster Gates, Duane Hanson, Rick Lowe, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sterling Ruby, Anna Weyant, Stanley Whitney, and Christopher Wool is included.
Richard Prince, Untitled, 2015, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut © Richard Prince
On View
Multiplicity
Blackness in Contemporary American Collage
Through May 12, 2024
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
www.mfah.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. This exhibition originated at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Work by Derrick Adams, Lauren Halsey, and Rick Lowe is included.
Lauren Halsey, Loda Land, 2020 © Lauren Halsey
On View
Derrick Adams
Future People . . . Take Off
Through May 25, 2024
PES FUTURES, New York
www.pesfutures.org
Derrick Adams’s exhibition Future People . . . Take Off, an imagined environment meditating on past, present, and future ideas of Black culture, Futurism, and African roots, is the inaugural presentation in the PES FUTURES program. Sited in Project for Empty Space’s new headquarters, PES FUTURES is a space for artists interested in the realization of parallel and intersecting potentialities and the possibility to claim and reclaim space through their work. Inspired by the Afrofuturist movement, Adams’s installation incorporates images, video, and music.
Derrick Adams, Orbiting Us 1, 2017 © Derrick Adams Studio
On View
Giants
Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys
Through July 7, 2024
Brooklyn Museum, New York
www.brooklynmuseum.org
Giants, the first major exhibition of the Dean Collection, owned by musical icons Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys, showcases a focused selection from the couple’s world-class holdings and spotlights works by Black diasporic artists. Expansive in their collecting habits, the Deans, both born and raised in New York, champion a philosophy of “artists supporting artists.” “Giants” refers to the renown of legendary artists, the impact of canon-expanding contemporary figures, and some of the monumental works in the collection. Work by Derrick Adams, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Titus Kaphar, and Deana Lawson is included.
Derrick Adams, Woman in Grayscale (Alicia), 2017 © Derrick Adams Studio
On View
Derrick Adams in
Kindred Worlds: The Priscila and Alvin Hudgins Collection
Through March 2, 2025
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York
www.hrm.org
Drawn from the private collection of Priscila and Alvin Hudgins III, Kindred Worlds reveals the couple’s deep and enduring devotion to the arts. For the Hudginses, collecting was a way of building home and community. Their artworks, many of which include images of family members, demonstrate a dynamic network of relationships between collector and artist, artist and subject, and subject and kin. Work by Derrick Adams is included.
Derrick Adams, Floater 101, 2020 © Derrick Adams Studio
Opening Soon
The Culture
Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century
June 28–September 29, 2024
Cincinnati Art Museum
www.cincinnatiartmuseum.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. This exhibition originated at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Deana Lawson, Nation, 2018 © Deana Lawson
Closed
Derrick Adams
Sanctuary
January 26–April 14, 2024
Middlebury College Museum of Art, Vermont
www.middlebury.edu
Sanctuary presents fifty works of mixed-media collage, assemblage-on-wood panels, and sculpture by Derrick Adams that reimagine safe destinations for the Black American traveler during the mid-twentieth century. This body of work was inspired by The Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual guidebook for Black American road-trippers published by New York postal worker Victor Hugo Green during the Jim Crow era in the United States. The exhibition, curated by Dexter Wimberly, reflects on the plight of working-class Black people before and during the Civil Rights Movement and their determination to pursue the same American Dream afforded to other US citizens. This exhibition originated at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
Installation view, Derrick Adams: Sanctuary, Middlebury College Museum of Art, Vermont, January 26–April 14, 2024. Artwork © Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: Jonathan Blake
Closed
Derrick Adams in
Black California Dreamin’: Claiming Space at America’s Leisure Frontier
August 5, 2023–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
Multiplicity
Blackness in Contemporary American Collage
September 15–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, Lauren Halsey, and Rick Lowe is included.
Rick Lowe, Black Wall Street Journey #2, 2020, installation view, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: John Schweikert
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