ICA: Derrick Adams: View Master

“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

This first mid-career survey of the prolific New York–based artist Derrick Adams (b. 1970 in Baltimore) offers a sweeping view of his multidisciplinary practice over twenty years. Adams celebrates contemporary Black life and culture through a distinct representational language. He often combines planar shapes and patterns to create multifaceted figures that center leisure, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. Adams’s painting, sculpture, collage, performance, video, and public projects celebrate the beauty of everyday life, transforming these moments into an iconography that resonates with the richness and complexity of Black culture in our time.