Derrick Adams American, b. 1970

In a diverse, exceptionally prolific practice that spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, drawing, and video, Derrick Adams embraces pop culture and radical depictions of leisure in Black American communities. His work often features fractured surfaces and flat planes of bold colour. He has collaged together images from early TV shows and made innumerable joyful portraits of Black subjects. Adams earned his BFA at Pratt Institute and his MFA at Columbia University. His work has been exhibited in New York, Miami, London, Paris, Rome, and Johannesburg, and belongs in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among other institutions. On the secondary market, Adams's work regularly commands six figures.

Adams frequently draws on black history and popular culture. His 2018 installation Sanctuary, inspired by the Negro Motorist Green Book, reimagined spaces of safety and leisure for black travellers during segregation. His public commissions, including Around the Way (2019) in Brooklyn and Our Time Together (2021) at the Milwaukee Art Museum, bring together historical imagery, local communities and contemporary representations of black life.

His later Motion Picture Paintings series incorporates references to film, music and everyday experience, combining stylised figures and text in compositions that resemble cinematic stills. Across his practice, Adams considers how black culture is represented, remembered and experienced, while placing particular emphasis on ordinary moments of pleasure, social connection and self-fashioning.