Derrick Adams is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Adams' work celebrates and expands the dialogue around contemporary Black life and culture through scenes of normalcy and perseverance. In addition to his critically acclaimed art practice, Adams has held numerous teaching positions and is currently a tenured assistant professor in the School of Visual, Media and Performing Arts at CUNY Brooklyn College. He also holds an honorary doctorate from Maryland Institute College of Art.
In 2022, Adams established Charm City Cultural Cultivation, a non-profit organization to support and encourage underserved communities in the city of Baltimore through events conducted by three entities: The Last Resort Artist Retreat, a residency program that subscribes to the concept of leisure as therapy for the Black creative; The Black Baltimore Digital Database, a collaborative counter-institutional space for collecting, storing, and safekeeping the data of local archival initiatives; and Zora’s Den, an online community of Black women writers started in January 2017, which has since expanded to in-person writing workshops, a writers’ circle, and a monthly reading series that strive to promote instruction, support, and social engagement.
Adams has been the subject of significant solo exhibitions at institutions such as The Cleveland Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, as well as notable group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Henry Art Gallery and the Kent State University Museum. His art resides in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, among many others.