News / Derrick Adams / 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Closed

Derrick Adams
Sanctuary

January 25–August 12, 2018
Museum of Arts and Design, New York
madmuseum.org

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.