A celebrated American artist whose vibrant works explore themes of Black identity, joy, and culture, blending powerful social narratives with bold esthetics, Derrick Adams’ market value is steadily climbing.

The annual global art fair in Miami featured a heady mélange of artists, gallerists, A-list celebrities, luxury brands and Mad Libs-esque collaborations among many of them.

Even the best museums, galleries, critics, and auction houses cannot talk about art without their names. Derek Adams, Refik Anadol, and Nicolas Party visited Korea. The artists I met in person were as considerate and gentle as their works, full of respect for their roots, nature, and things that will disappear.

The protagonist of Gagosian Gallery’s first pop-up exhibition in Korea is artist Derek Adams, who has been visually exploring black identity for a long time. His new work, filled with colorful mannequins, contains stories of all people beyond nationality and skin color.

Kicking off Seoul Art Week, American artist Derrick Adams opened a flashy show of his work at the headquarters of world-renowned Korean beauty company Amorepacific. Titled “The Strip,” it marks the artist’s debut in the city and Gagosian’s first presentation in Seoul outside of the fairs. 

Ahead of two shows in Seoul, the artist, famed for his colorful figurative work, reflects on urban aesthetics, Black joy and turning the quotidian into the sublime.

Far beyond the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, where office buildings turn into Dollar Trees and commuters become residents, you’ll find the studio of the artist Derrick Adams. The 54-year old artist works out of a Brooklyn warehouse space to make art that reflects life, but that’s not intended to be trite.

Last August, when Gagosian revealed that it had tapped the veteran Seoul art dealer Jiyoung Lee to run its operations in South Korea, speculation mounted about the mega gallery’s plans. A bevy of blue-chip foreign dealers have set up branches in the country in recent years. Would Gagosian be next?

With their envy-inducing holdings, the Dean Collection, the music-industry power couple have helped lead the way for a generation of collectors of Black art. The rest of the world is finally catching up.

In "Sanctuary," currently on view at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams, known for work that explores his Black identity, takes inspiration from the ingenuity and resilience necessary for people of color to travel safely in the Jim Crow era.

British artist David Hockney famously quipped, “Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.” Contemporary Art Underground, a forthcoming book from Monacelli posits that these two facets of visual culture are a match made to move us indeed.

The High Line today announces that two vibrant works by Derrick Adams are now on view on the High Line – Moynihan Connector Billboard, which overlooks the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel from its location on Dyer Avenue between 30th and 31st Streets.

Where's Marty? Taking a look at the work of Derrick Adams ahead of this weekend's Artscape festival

Derrick Adams is serious about leisure. His jubilant, candy-colored paintings depict Black subjects in repose, in the midst of revelry, and surrounded by the creature comforts of home.

"Sanctuary," a tribute to Victor Hugo Green and his travel guides, is now on view at Detroit's Wright Museum.

Later this month, six artist installations will be unveiled on the grounds of the National Mall in Washington D.C. The six commissions draw from the history of underrepresented groups in American history and historical events that took place on the Mall and the surrounding D.C. area.

The Baltimore artist conjures a canvas out of his hometown.

New public art show will bring alternative monuments by Derrick Adams, Wendy Red Star, vanessa german and others to the busiest national park in the US

Whether in his studio art, public commissions, or community-minded initiatives, the artist embraces a vision of connection, empowerment, and joy

Make a day of it with these suggested art excursions in the Windy City, with pauses for refreshment along the way

No matter what was happening with the outside world, everything was alright in Chicago last week — especially as digital public art program ART on THE MART inaugurated its fifth season last Friday night by unveiling a short, bright animated feature from Derrick Adams amongst the balmy weather welcoming EXPO CHICAGO. Adams showed work at the art fair with West Town-based Rhona Hoffman Gallery, and installed another “Funtime Unicorn” on Navy Pier, where it went down.

Pegged to EXPO Chicago, we put together a walking tour of four exhibitions for anyone near the Loop in the coming weeks. Each is free.

One might go to an art fair anticipating spectacle, but what I found at Expo Chicago was much more heartening, and deeply Midwestern.

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Chicago's colorful and visually stunning outdoor art exhibit returns this weekend at Art on the MART.

The core of visual artist Derrick Adams' work is Black joy, showcasing vibrant images and installations that represent a life of leisure that our community deserves. This is best displayed in his famous Funtime Unicorn series celebrating Black joy, love and play. Now the work will be blown-up in a larger-than-life display at Chicago's ART on THE MART.

The 2023 spring season of ART on THE MART kicks off on April 14 with a new commission by acclaimed artist Derrick Adams. This site-specific work, which builds on the artist’s famed Funtime Unicorn project, will be on display from April 27 to May 14.

“It has to deal with strife and challenges and trying to be optimistic in the face of adversity. And you take all those things into your studio, and you try to do something with them, as an ingredient.”

The artist discusses the politics of representing Black leisure and play in his 'Motion Picture Paintings' series, currently on view at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York 

Gagosian has taken on the global representation of Derrick Adams, one of today’s most beloved artists. Adams will have his first show with Gagosian at the gallery’s location in Beverly Hills, California, in September.

His latest exhibition at Rhona Hoffman gallery, titled “…and friends,” as a reference to a range of early educational TV programming usually meant to teach compassion and friendship, features paintings showcasing a Black child with a puppet. Adams reflects on the inflated, abstracted nature of contemporary American and African American reality as seen through television and media—their influence takes center stage whether concealed or unapologetically in-your-face.

Brooklyn-based creative Derrick Adams is using his bright and bold pieces to focus on the theme of Black joy — and offering an alternative way to view Black Culture.

Derrick Adams’, I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You exhibition at the Flag Art Foundation in New York City is a collection of 16 paintings from his new series Motion Picture Paintings. This collection from Adams comprises freeze-framed moments from movies, his personal life, and even his imagination.

His new paintings, with their perfect planes of color, expand on the theme of “Black Joy,” proving that delight and humor are their own form of resistance.

There’s simply not enough time to see all the art in the world. In CULTURED’s new monthly column, Duly Noted, New York contributing arts editor Jacoba Urist cuts through the noise to tell you about the most important art shows and why you need to see them

CBS2's Dave Carlin profiles a visual artist whose work is now seen in several New York City neighborhoods.

Inside the busiest train station in America, taking a moment to slow down can feel unnatural. But new artwork inside Penn Station combats that feeling by bringing the natural world inside. 

Celebrating the richness and vibrancy of Black culture and community.

Themes explored in next summer’s temporary exhibi5on may include diaspora, migra5on, displacement and civic gathering.

While preparing for "Sweet Spot," his upcoming show at LGDR & Wei in Hong Kong,​ the artist made the time to create Cultured​'s​ next commemorative anniversary cover.

This year’s International Fine Print Dealers Association Print Fair features work so eye-catching, it’s easy to forget the medium is sometimes disregarded in the art world.

Upon entrance to the fair, visitors are met with the IFPDA’s large-scale Derrick Adams commission “Eye Candy” (2022), a colorful contemplation of Blackness, masculinity, and consumerism, and a work so eye-catching that it’s easy to forget prints are sometimes disregarded in the art world.

Ahead of unveiling a new commission at the IFPDA Print Fair in New York, Derrick Adams invites us inside his Brooklyn studio.

For the final installment of our social-practice series, we speak to Derrick Adams about his community work beyond the studio.
This is the final interview in a four-part series by Folasade Ologundudu featuring Black artists across generations who work with social practice.

The Manhattan flagship of luxury jewelry giant Tiffany & Co. became the scene for a benefit art auction preview and the launch of a new initiative focused on fostering a more diverse and inclusive jewelry industry through commitment, leadership, and learning. Amid the cases of dazzling precious metals and gemstones, the real glow emanated from the morning's focal point: Derrick Adams' I Shine, You Shine, We Shine, the genesis for the Tiffany Atrium logo.

Titled “Resilience,” the show is curated by Superposition’s founder, Storm Ascher, and invites participating artists to respond visually to the idea of resilience. The exhibition includes framed prints, drawings, and paintings by a range of emerging and established artists including Derrick Adams, Renee Cox, Patrick Alston, and Tariku Shiferaw, among others.

The unicorns have arrived at Rockefeller Center for their summer residency. Last week Derrick Adams was on hand for the unveiling of his delightful public art installation, “Funtime Unicorns,” located within Rock Center’s Channel Gardens. The work spoke to an eager and younger demographic than most of his gallery exhibitions: children.

The Art Production Fund and Rockefeller Center present “Funtime Unicorns,” an interactive sculpture show by New York-based visual artist Derrick Adams set in Channel Gardens and on view through September 9. Adams’s multi-disciplinary art practice has always centered the Black experience through a lens of pop culture, self-image, and humanity, and this newest show—being the debut production of his venture Derrick Adams Editions—invests this idea of Blackness with a mythical, colorful, and playful dimension in an urban setting.

Derrick Adams is broadening his artistic practice through a new venture eponymously dubbed DERRICK ADAMS EDITIONS. Launched yesterday, the first release on the site draws from his Floater series of paintings, by bringing the black unicorn character to life.

Derrick Adams looks to bring Black joy to the heart of Midtown Manhattan with his new Art Production Fund public installation Funtime Unicorns, featuring interactive black unicorn sculptures-cum-playground toys. The figure of the black unicorn first appeared in Adams’s “Floater” painting series, of portraits of Black people resting on pool floats that the artist later fabricated as actual inflatables.

At a time when the country is spinning in circles trying to make sense of race, ward off inhumanity and define social justice, Parks’s artistic heirs are uniquely positioned to shed light, offer guidance and question the status quo. They’re doing so with heartening audacity and blessed urgency.

Context is everything in Derrick Adams: Sanctuary, now at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. At a glance, the works are lighthearted—deceptively so, because they were inspired by a practical response to racism.

Derrick Adams moved to New York from Baltimore nearly 30 years ago because there weren’t many opportunities for him as an artist. Now Adams, 52, whose work has been recognized worldwide, wants to create spaces for Black artists in Baltimore, so they won’t have to leave home to find success.

In Looks, artist Derrick Adams references the immense potential of a wig to alter an appearance and construct a persona. The exhibition, which is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through May 29 alongside a survey of art and fashion photography titled The New Black Vanguard (opens May 8), shows nine of Adam’s portraits rendered in the artist’s distinct geometric style evocative of “Benin heads, Kwele masks, Kota reliquary figures,” and other West African masks and sculptures, he says in a statement.

The archive will catalogue local achievements in art, entrepreneurship, and other areas.

A Smithsonian traveling exhibition powerfully dismantles corrosive myths with triumphant portraits and the stories of African American men

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Black American artists often have portrayed racial injustice through images of conflict and suffering. Derrick Adams, a highly acclaimed mid-career New York artist, whose work is the subject of an elegant and seductive exhibition on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, has taken a different path.

The 52-year-old multidisciplinary artist portrays Black life through images of ravishing beauty that are steeped in his deep knowledge of art history and a commitment to highly polished visual thinking and object-making.

EXPO Offers Limited Edition Derrick Adams Print

EXPO CHICAGO will offer an exclusive print edition by acclaimed artist Derrick Adams in celebration of the fair’s in-person return to Navy Pier, April 7-10. “Silver Lining” is an edition of one hundred and is printed by Tandem Press, publisher of fine art prints, in collaboration with Rhona Hoffman Gallery. “We renewed a tradition of the early Chicago fairs in 2019 by collaborating with artists Nick Cave and Bob Faust and Landfall Press, to publish a limited edition print that commemorated the exposition and supported EXPO CHICAGO’s Curatorial Initiatives programming,” Tony Karman, EXPO president-director says in a release. “We are extremely proud to celebrate the return of our in-person 2022 exposition with this extraordinary new print.” The print is available for advance purchase here and on-site at EXPO CHICAGO.

EXPO CHICAGO the international exposition of contemporary and modern art, today announced an exclusive print edition by acclaimed artist Derrick Adams in celebration of the fair's in-person return to Navy Pier, April 7-10.

Tifrere hopes to add Sam Gilliam and Frank Bowling to her collection this year.

Curator and art advisor Mashonda Tifrere has been collecting art since she was 18, when she signed her first music publishing deal in 1999. Highlights of her music career include being a featured performer on a Jay-Z single and a role as part of the original cast of VH1 reality show Love & Hip Hop: New York.

Derrick Adams’s studio in a partially converted Brooklyn warehouse is a bright, tidy space: white walls, a pair of white sofas. In September, a painting hanging on one of the walls is a peephole into another world altogether: a museum gallery is decked out for a party. There are balloons, and a “Happy Birthday” banner. On the museum wall, in this tableau, is a painting of the movie poster for Mr. Soul, the 2018 documentary about groundbreaking TV producer and talk show host Ellis Haizlip and his program SOUL!, which ran on public television from 1968 to 1973, and threw a spotlight on the Black Arts Movement. In the center of the gallery are two sculptures: the late artist Elizabeth Catlett’s 1955 Target, the bust of an African American man from the collection of the High Museum in Atlanta, and a sculpture of a powerful female figure by Mali’s Bambara people. Both are wearing party hats, and the Bambaran sculpture has a blowout noisemaker in its mouth. The sole human guest at the festivities is a museum security guard, a Black woman, who blows a bright pink celebratory bubble of gum. The piece exudes joy; it is itself a celebration of Black culture.

Isabella Lauria, Associate Vice President, Head of Post-War to Present Sales and Specialist of Christie’s, speaks about Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams’ art market.

The artist dedicates this site-specific installation to “the perseverance of Black Americans in their pursuit of happiness.”

The Milwaukee Art Museum exhibition On Site: Derrick Adams features a multimedia wall mural and sculptural installation the artist created specifically for the museum. Featuring important sites of Black culture in Milwaukee, “Our Time Together” (2021) celebrates everyday life on a monumental scale.

A panoramic view shows the entirety of the "Our Time Together mural" at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Derrick Adams' mural, inspired in part by "The Green Book," celebrates the rituals of everyday Black life and leisure.

For more than a decade, Razor House, the stunning cliffside mansion by architectural designer Wallace E. Cunningham in La Jolla, California, has alternately been described as a “magnum opus,” an “architectural masterpiece,” and “America’s coolest home.” But since purchasing the modernist gem in 2019, Grammy Award–winning singer Alicia Keys and her husband, renowned music producer Kasseem Dean (a.k.a. Swizz Beatz), have preferred to call the home where they and their two sons, Egypt and Genesis, now reside “Dreamland.” Explaining the name, Keys says the expansive, nearly 11,000-square-foot residence, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean and is rumored to be the inspiration for Tony Stark’s futuristic bachelor pad in the Iron Man movies, is “a place to create dreams and to be bold enough to dream your wildest dream—for us to even be here is a wildest dream.”

A newly commissioned large-scale wall mural and sculptural installation will be unveiled October 29 at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Created by Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams, Our Time Together will be a 93-foot work that reframes historical Black narratives.

“In Our Time Together, I highlight Milwaukee by representing commercial and social spaces known within the Black community,” said Derrick Adams. “These dwellings, and those who occupy them, are essential to the cultural, political and creative growth of American society, which is then spread out to a global audience. The installation reflects my respect and admiration for the perseverance of Black Americans in their pursuit of happiness and speaks to transformation, belonging and normalcy.”

THE BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART (BMA) recently made a major acquisition announcement. The museum has received a promised gift of 90 works of art by nearly 70 artists from museum patrons Nancy Dorman and Stanley Mazaroff, alongside 175 purchases and gifts made during winter and spring 2021. 

Each month, we’re spotlighting an artist we love—and whose work is currently live for bidding on Artnet Auctions. This month: Derrick Adams.

Baltimore-born, Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams is recognized for his portraits of scenes from everyday life celebrating Black culture and self-determination. I discuss with Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, founder of Salon 94, about his art market. Her New York City-based art gallery has represented Adams since September 2019. 

Just when you thought the mash-up of big money, celebrities, and NFTs could not get any more intense, there’s a new high-profile collaboration in town. To mark the 25th anniversary of hip-hop icon Jay-Z’s first album Reasonable Doubt—which dropped on June 25, 1996—the artist commissioned a work of digital art by sought-after artist Derrick Adams.

Esteemed by museums, curators, collectors, and fellow artists alike, Derrick Adams’s art is now the subject of a booming market, making him one of the most sought-after contemporary artists.

Ideas pour from Derrick Adams, and what’s surprising is how many of them work out. A couple of years ago, around the time that he was making his Floater paintings, depicting Black people lounging on swimming-pool inflatables, he thought, Why not start a creative persons’ retreat where the only obligation would be to appreciate leisure? 

It is difficult to explain the erasure of the Black body in imagery linked to American recreation and to expound on the psychological damage of not seeing oneself reflected in the world one inhabits. So much of the experience of being Black in America is born of escape—escaping slavery and servitude and systemic persecution, escaping the pain of generational trauma—that Adams’ paintings feel like an American Dream rendering unabashed Black joy in full saturation. Black joy is the primary aesthetic of the work and it begins a conversation on who is afforded leisure in America, and why. Cleverly, Adams constantly reminds us how race, gender, politics and power dictate our visual culture, and how ecstatic joy only exists in relation to the extremity of violence. But this is not the sole aim of “The Last Resort.”

 Music meets the art of Derrick Adams in a recent project from Tandem Press and UW-Madison student composers.

Forbes contributor Chadd Scott speaks to Derrick Adams and Hudson River Museum Director Masha Turchinsky about pervasive images of blackness within Western art and the importance of representing black leisure. 

Artnet news reviewed Derrick Adams: Buoyant on view at the Hudson River Museum. Buoyant is the first museum exhibition of Adams’ Floaters series and debuts We Came to Party and Plan (extended through October 18), new related works the artist created during his summer 2019 Rauschenberg Residency. Adams' Floaters depict a world where joy, love, leisure, and even prosaic normalcy play central roles, methodically filling the many voids and omissions in popular visual culture depicting African Americans.  

Derrick Adams collaborates with the late fashion designer, Patrick Kelly, by juxtaposing materials from Kelly's archive with his own abstract collages and sculptures. In this exhibition Adams seeks to “talk about fashion, talk about the form, talk about the body without using the figure.”

A review of Derrick Adams: Buoyant at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York.  Though the museum is temporarily closed due to COVID-19 viewers can engage virtually with Adams' exhibition on the museum's website.   

Adams discusses Where I'm From, his first solo show in his native Baltimore, and his plans to create a "bed and breakfast" artist residency in Baltimore's Waverly neighborhood.  

Review of Where I'm From, at the Gallery in Baltimore City Hall.

Review of New Icons at Mary Boone Gallery.

Review of Derrick Adams: Interior Life at Luxembourg & Dayan, New York.

Review of Derrick Adams: Interior Life at Luxembourg & Dayan, New York.

Review of America's Playground at Miami Beach's Faena Hotel.

Review of Live and in Color at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.