Derrick Adams celebrates the joy of the Black American experience through art

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Amna Nawaz: As the rainbow array outside Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art right now suggests, artist Derrick Adams is accentuating the positive. He celebrates contemporary Black life and culture, depicting leisure, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness.

Jared Bowen from GBH Boston recently sat down with him on the occasion of his first museum survey.

It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jared Bowen: 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 Tootsie Rolls or be held by family?

Derrick Adams, Artist: 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.

Jared Bowen: That radiance is now felt and full at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art all in the new exhibition Derrick Adams: View Master.

It’s the artist’s first ever museum survey and features more than 20 years of painting, sculpture, and performance art. Here, you will find unicorns prance, Beyonce performs, and one blissed-out dessert lover luxuriates in pie.

Derrick Adams: It just shows this expensive experience that an artist can have when they’re driven and focused on trying to create an alternative viewpoint and looking at Black American experience.

I’m from Baltimore, and I have a lot of great stories and memories of growing up in Baltimore.

Jared Bowen: 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.”

Derrick Adams: 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. 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.

Jared Bowen: 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.

Derrick Adams: 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.

Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston: As you can see in the space, he’s a maximalist in every way.

Jared Bowen: ICA assistant curator Tessa Bachi Haas says the exhibition is like visiting Adams’ 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.

Why this moment for the survey?

Tessa Bachi Haas: I love that question.

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 the history that Derrick has explored throughout his lifetime.

Jared Bowen: One genre to which he’s repeatedly returned is portraiture, images of strangers, friends, and his own deeply connected family.

Tessa Bachi Haas: 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.

Derrick Adams: 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.

Jared Bowen: Or how they chill. This glimpse of a pool party is one of Adams newest works. It’s a moment among friends that rang out to the artist like a clarion call that it had to be captured.

Derrick Adams: You can feel the experience of the floatie, 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 in leisure.

I think that’s the way to kind of really educate people, especially the new generation of artists, of how to reexamine history and how to tell it the way that you want to tell it.

Jared Bowen: Or mastering the view anew.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jared Bowen in Boston.