{"id":397213,"date":"2026-04-25T15:44:03","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T15:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/397213\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T15:44:03","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T15:44:03","slug":"at-the-ica-derrick-adams-and-the-hard-work-of-black-repose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/397213\/","title":{"rendered":"At the ICA, Derrick Adams and the hard work of Black repose"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DerrickDerrick Adams, “When the Stars Align,” 2026. Derrick Adams and Gagosian<\/p>\n

Adams, who grew up in a working-class Black neighborhood in Baltimore, had a front-row seat to joy as a cultural practice. His stepfather, Guy Curtis Davidson, was the drummer for Parliament-Funkadelic<\/a>, George Clinton\u2019<\/a>s deliriously unhinged, deeply influential funk orchestra<\/a>. His first cousins were Russell Simmons<\/a>, the founder of Def Jam Records, and his brothers Joseph<\/a>, \u2018Run\u2019 of Run-DMC<\/a>, and Danny<\/a>, a successful painter<\/a>. Any one of them would have suggested to a young Adams a world of bright possibility. Together, they might have made a life and career in cultural achievement seem just kind of normal. <\/p>\n

The spectrum of those influences, affirming Black life as worth not only acknowledging but celebrating, feels like groundwork here. You can think of his series, \u201cFloating,\u201d bright expressions of observed leisure, as something elemental to the world he creates. In the series, Black subjects drift in bright blue swimming pools on an array of inflatables, and in evident bliss. <\/p>\n

\"InstallationInstallation view, “Derrick Adams: View Master,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art\/Boston, 2026.Mel Taing<\/p>\n

Taken at face value, such works can fool you into thinking they mean only to capture simple seductive pleasure. \u201cI\u2019ll Be Right Here,\u201d a 2026 entry to the series that hangs here, features a man snoozing on a rainbow-maned blow-up unicorn, a foot dangling in the water. Think, and look, a little more deeply, if you\u2019ll pardon the pun. Much of the history of the depiction of Black subjects has rarely been so blissfully mundane. Adams counterweighs a heavier history of violence and trauma \u2014 in movies and on TV, in the broad myths of urban American decay \u2014 as an act of defiance: unremarkable leisure as revolution. <\/p>\n

To get there, sunny images can\u2019t be simple ones, and Adams acknowledges it literally on the surface. Using a gamut of materials \u2014 paint, but also collaged scraps of fabric, wood, caution tape, and in plenty of instances, doll furniture and toy cars \u2014 Adams constructs a world cobbled of fragments, never quite convincingly whole. The people in his pictures are knit together in angular patches of color, fractures forced together in unsettling compositions. <\/p>\n

The art nerds among us (that\u2019s me) will note a deliberate nod to Cubism, which offered a fractal view of an object from multiple perspectives at once. The point, to say there is no single way of seeing anything that\u2019s authoritative or true, is the relevant kernel here. In looking at the history of portrayals of Black life in America, Adams isn\u2019t fracturing perspective so much as perception, denying a single, stable image of a history written largely not by Black hands. <\/p>\n

\""Derrick“Derrick Adams: View Master” at the ICA. Foreground: “Playthings,” 2002\/2018.Murray Whyte\/Globe Staff<\/p>\n

That sounds complicated, I know. Adams, doesn\u2019t demand a deep dive. He wants you to be happy, to drink in the froth of visual joy he serves up. But he also wants you to want to come closer. Single pieces seduce, confuse, amuse, all at once. In \u201cEasy Street,\u201d 2025, an outsize profile of a Black man in Adams\u2019s trademark fragmented style perches on top of a red convertible as he barks into a cellphone while driving past literal cookie-cutter two-dimensional houses: \u201cIf you\u2019re listening God, please don\u2019t make it hard.\u201d A 2024 painting of a silver-haired Black woman holding a shaggy purse-size dog, is emblazoned, puzzlingly, with the sparkly text of the word: HOME. <\/p>\n

Like almost all of his work, these works are visually inventive and genuinely original. The undercurrent of puzzlement is a cue \u2014 to wonder less what he means, and embrace what the work makes you feel. Adams doesn\u2019t give clues so much as contexts. He conceived giant collage wallpapers for the various sections of the show. In this one, the wall is papered with pages of The Negro Motorist Green Book<\/a>, a pre-civil rights travel guide for Black motorists that listed businesses \u2014 restaurants, gas stations, motels \u2014 that were safe to stop at in the segregated South. A reprise of a 2018 show he called \u201cSanctuary,\u201d<\/a> it resonates here in deep and oblique ways. \u201cEasy Street\u201d is pinned to big blow-ups of the book\u2019s typewritten pages; its cartoony, almost clich\u00e9d liberation takes on new meaning, or at least it did for me. A joy ride now in a different era might have been a literal matter of life and death. <\/p>\n

\"DerrickDerrick Adams, “Eye Candy,” 2023. Installation view, “Derrick Adams: View Master,” Institute of Contemporary Art\/Boston, 2026. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. \u00a9 Derrick Adams.Mel Taing<\/p>\n

A sculptural work occupies a tabletop in the middle of the room: \u201cPlaythings,\u201d 2002\/2018, one of the oldest pieces here, is a congregation of tourist-shop African figurines dressed in Barbie doll clothes. It feels formative. Its absurd humor moves quickly into the realm of critique \u2014 about commodity, and a displaced culture\u2019s quest for roots. They\u2019re positioned on an infant\u2019s playmat depicting a street winding through a neighborhood with cutesy versions of a school, hospital, fire station, all set in bright green grass. It says something more, I think, about diaspora, forced migration, and the historic struggle Black Americans have always had to situate themselves in a context they did not choose. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s an important touchstone from an earlier time, from when Adams was yet to formalize his approach, and the rawness, the directness, is something to savor. But across the decades, it has close kin here nonetheless. In \u201cEye Candy,\u201d 2023, the image of an underwear model from a 1970s issue of Ebony magazine is reproduced in a rainbow of color \u2014 a reproduced commercial product, from which you could pick your favorite. The echo of Pop Art and its sly embrace of consumer culture is loud and clear, a frequent comparison for Adams\u2019s candy-colored oeuvre. But the piece is powerful in a way unique to it: It\u2019s a reminder of the objectification every one of Adams\u2019s pieces resists \u2014 a destabilizing of a simple view, and an insistence on the complexity and fragmentation of the Black American experience. Adams\u2019s work may be about dignity and joy, but in its fractures, the picture is far from complete \u2014 like America itself. <\/p>\n

DERRICK ADAMS: VIEW MASTER<\/p>\n

Through Sept. 7, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive. 617-478-3100, icaboston.org<\/a><\/p>\n

Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com<\/a>. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte<\/a>.<\/p>\n