When Derrick Adams was commissioned last year to create a visual art installation for Penn Station, he didn’t have a hard time figuring out what he might do with the space. But it wasn't just the Brooklyn-based artist's success in designing other public art projects that helped him determine what might work in this specific venue; it was also all the time he’d spent in Penn Station as a traveler, waiting for the Eastern Corridor Amtrak to take him back to his hometown of Baltimore.
“Penn Station has a bleakness to it – it’s a commuter space that’s not designed to be comfortable,” Adams said, smirking, during a conversation earlier this month. “I was really aware of every corner. Making a piece for it was not that big of a challenge.”
“The City Is My Refuge,” commissioned by the Art at Amtrak program, drapes the walls, columns and even some of the ceilings in Penn Station’s concourse and rotunda. Faces in many skin tones peek out from lush green trees and bushes, rendered in Adams’ signature style: part Cubism, part childlike cutouts, and all warm colors, representing all races.
At Penn Station one recent Monday evening during rush hour, commuter Joan McCormick was waiting for an NJ Transit train to take her home to Metuchen. Her eyes were glued to the big board’s track announcements, but then they wandered across the faces peering out of hedgerows in Adams’ installation, which she suddenly noticed all around her.
“This is kind of nice, because it's the faces of different people, so I guess it's supposed to be the faces of the commuters,” McCormick said, smiling. “It kind of makes me feel good, because it exhibits some emotion. Good emotions. Happy emotions.”
Adams says the greenery represents his view of the city as a space to hide away. “I don't see the city as being hectic in the way that some people feel,” he said. Bringing images he associated with other parts of the city, he explains, “would give people a sense of seeing New York not just as this very concentrated, very cold place, but a place that also fosters nature. And nature is all around.”
In designing an installation for Penn Station, Derrick Adams wanted to reminder commuters that New York City is filled with natural beauty.
This kind of sympathetic outlook has long been central to the different types of art the 53 year-old Adams creates. Now, it's fueling a moment in which his work is increasingly being recognized in both the public art and fine art realms. In addition to his Penn Station installation, Adams recently opened a major show of new paintings: “I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You,” at the FLAG Art Foundation gallery in Chelsea. The works there showcase his documentation of day-to-day normalcy and beauty in Black lives, using images from TV, films and advertisements as starting points.
His recognition extends well beyond New York. In December, Adams was introduced as one of the artists who’ll be participating in “Pulling Together,” a public-art project produced by the Trust for the National Mall set to bring new monuments to the Washington, D.C. landmark. Earlier in 2022, he was named the winner of a $1.25 million Mellon Foundation grant to develop an art archive of Black Baltimore.
“Derrick’s got it,” says Debra Simon, who curates the Art at Amtrak program and has been producing public cultural events and installations for over 30 years. “He's a polymath. He thinks in so many ways — in scale and style and discipline. I don't think there's anything that Derrick Adams can't do, and do in an excellent fashion.”
For his 2019 MTA-commissioned "Around the Way" at the Nostrand Ave. LIRR stop, Adams created stained-glass images inspired by his neighbors.
Adams grew up in a middle-class Black neighborhood in Baltimore, a close-knit community where “everyone knew everyone’s first and last names,” he said.
He took to art early, and won a citywide grade-school competition on the theme of “My Heritage, Myself,” with an image that now seems to foreshadow his lifelong themes of normalcy, leisure, popular culture and Black history.
“I drew an image of a Black American family on the floor with their kid,” he said, “and on the television screen — another picture that I drew within the picture — it was another family in a more African, traditional environment with their kid.”
Becoming a youthful art star who would do signs and murals for his school, and enlisting friends to help him, provided another valuable lesson.
“That's when I realized the role of an artist, more so than when I was making art: that it was kind of an interesting responsibility,” he said. “That art was not just about self-expression, but about community, it was about communicating and about representation.”
Adams moved to New York in the early ‘90s. He earned his undergraduate degree in art education at Pratt Institute (he now teaches at Brooklyn College), followed by an MFA at Columbia. In between, he interned at the New York City Art Commission, which opened his eyes wider still.
“I went back and forth through all these different worlds, to understand not only what I'm making and how what I'm making affects the viewer, but also what types of viewers are in certain places and how they respond to things based on their exposure to art,” he said. “It all has to do with your understanding of what your role is in each space. And as an artist, you have to understand that your role is not always the same.”
By 2014, Adams was making so many different kinds of work that New York Times art critic Roberta Smith lauded him as “multidisciplinary with a vengeance.” But his themes have remained familiar. “Sanctuary,” a 2018 mixed media takeover at the Museum of Art and Design was inspired by “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” a guide created by New York postal worker Victor Hugo for Black Americans to navigate the country’s roadways during the Jim Crow era.
Derrick Adams showed a playful side with his whimsical "Funtime Unicorns" at Rockefeller Center in 2022.
For “Around the Way,” a 2019 MTA commission for the Nostrand Avenue LIRR stop, Adams created stained glass inspired by the Crown Heights/Bedford-Stuyvesant residents the station serves, close to where Adams lives and works. Last summer’s “Funtime Unicorns” installation at Rockefeller Center was a whimsically signifying take on playground rocking horses, featuring Black unicorns with gold chains. All exhibit a familiar visual language that's formal and fluent in art history, though rarely forbidding.
Adams calls the acrylic paintings he’s showing at FLAG Art Foundation “the best representation of my work thus far.” As someone whose very first successful artwork featured a television, he freely admits the importance of media in his practice. “I use it constantly,” he said. “I don’t really know a world without TV or media.”
At FLAG Art Foundation, paintings like "Joyride 2" indicate how Adams adapts images from TV, film and other media.
The paintings in “I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You” make one kind of reference or another to images familiar from TV and film. Some are overt homages: the DeLorean in a painting titled “Joyride 2” is positioned against a billboard for the 1996 heist flick “Set It Off.” Other paintings seem like movie stills given a new context: two Black legs and a copy of the bell hooks book “all about love” peeking out from a hammock swinging in a park; a shirtless man in pot-leaf boxers is seen smoking through a gap in window drapes.
Adams recognizes that media images have been proven persuasive in shaping impressions of communities, whether positive or negative. His paintings, he said, are a way to “redirect those visual narratives into something that’s more empowering for us to look at ourselves.”
In paintings on view now at FLAG Art Foundation, Derrick Adams emphasizes positive, enpowering images.
The exhibit clearly fits into what has always been Adams’ broader agenda. “I want to make sure that the future generation of Black people — and people who support that experience of black people — can see other images of Black culture that are not reminding them of these traumatic things,” he said. “I wanna take every opportunity I can to give alternative narratives that are not necessarily spoken about.”
“Derrick Adams: I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You” is on view at FLAG Art Foundation through March 11. “The City Is My Refuge” is installed at Penn Station through summer 2023.
