How Derrick Adams radiates Black joy through art

Added: 2026-06-05

[00:00:00]The work of artist Derrick Adams sparkles with unmitigated joy. Who wouldn't want to take a breather atop an ice pop? Or delight in dreams of teeming Tootsie Rolls? Or be held by family?

[00:00:15]>> The attitude of my work is essential and an extension of me as a person. Even when images aren't smiling in my work, people still feel some sense of happiness or peace.

[00:00:25]>> That radiance is now felt in full at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art.

[00:00:30]All in the new exhibition, Derrick Adams: Viewmaster. It's the artist's first-ever museum survey and features more than 20 years of painting, sculpture, and performance art. Here, you'll find unicorns prance, Beyoncé performs, and one blissed-out dessert lover luxuriates in pie.

[00:00:51]>> It just shows like this expansive experience that an artist can have when they're driven and focused on trying to create an alternative viewpoint in looking at black American experience. I'm from Baltimore, and I have a lot of great stories and memories of growing up in Baltimore.

[00:01:09]>> Where Adams, who would one day become a teacher himself, says his first classroom was television. In particular, PBS and shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company.

[00:01:25]>> I was a real big TV kid, mainly because I had asthma growing up, and so a lot of the time I spent was at home.

[00:01:32]Like, I grew up feeling represented. So, a lot of things that I'm making in my work are what I felt as a younger person being seen and being focused on, being appreciated, educated.

[00:01:44]>> It also made his a colorful world. His work is resplendent in rainbow hues, and under his design, the museum's exterior is now adorned in color bars, the television programming that once populated airwaves after broadcasting ended each night.

[00:02:01]>> And I always thought of the color bars being like a curtain and there were people behind it. And so, color for me became more strategic. More psychological. Thinking about how people respond to color.

[00:02:13]>> As you can see in the space, he's a maximalist in every way.

[00:02:16]>> ICA assistant curator Tessa Basci Haas says the exhibition is like visiting Adam's own New York studio. It's an explosion of ideas, color, and people gathering. And as the show's title suggests, it evokes the nostalgic View-Master, the 1939 invention turned childhood staple, offering both entry into myriad worlds and how we see them.

[00:02:41]>> Why this moment for the survey?

[00:02:43]>> I love that question. You know, we're reflecting on 250 years of the United States as we know it today and American history is black history and American history is is the history that Derrick has explored throughout his lifetime.

[00:03:03]>> One genre to which he's repeatedly returned is portraiture. Images of strangers, friends, and his own deeply connected family.

[00:03:11]>> So, that idea of tracing family over time and tracing what it means to build a home and to build community and to build family over time is so intrinsic to Derrick's work.

[00:03:23]>> You get to understand how people form images of dignity, images of pride through their posturing, through the way that they hold that chin, the way that they look forward or look down or up.

[00:03:34]>> Or how they chill. This glimpse of a pool party is one of Adam's newest works. It's a moment among friends that rang out to the artist like a clarion call that it had to be captured.

[00:03:47]>> You can feel the experience of the floaty and how does that feel to be on something that's levitated and it's like looking at a Renaissance painting of someone on like a chaise lounge. It's like a new way of looking at a subject at leisure. I think that's the way to kind of really educate people, especially the new generation of artists, of how to re-examine history and how to tell it the way that you want to tell it.

[00:04:14]>> Or mastering the view anew.