Assistant Professor Derrick Adams continues to celebrate moments of everyday Black life in an installation at the Museum of Modern Art.
Derrick Adams believes that Black people should be portrayed in all their complexity as they navigate their daily lives, especially during those sometimes fleeting everyday moments not often captured in art.
鈥淲hat can I reveal that has not been shown? Black people鈥攏ot entertaining, just being, living. Letting people deal with that as reality,鈥� he says. It鈥檚 thoughts and questions like those that are at the center of his recent installation, The Modern Window: Derrick Adams, the latest in a series of site-specific installations by contemporary artists commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art and designed for the exterior window of The Modern restaurant on West 53rd Street.
Commissioned by MoMA to create an installation that 鈥渆ngages with the architecture鈥� of the Modern鈥檚 ground-floor window, Adams has built on that mandate to balance the visual narrative of Black people. In the installation, he accomplishes this by capturing a moment in time when people in late-20th-century model cars drive by two billboards advertising classics of 1990s Black cinema, Set It Off and Juice.
鈥淭he joys of cruising in a car, of seeing and being seen, and of being in a world of one鈥檚 own making, however momentary, pulse through the works,鈥� the museum鈥檚 description states. It is a moment in Black lives on an ordinary day.
Adams, who is deputy chair of the B.F.A. and co-deputy chair of the M.F.A. in Art programs, has received, among numerous accolades, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (2019) and a Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), and was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2020. His most recent solo exhibitions include 鈥淪tyle Variations鈥� (2021) at Salon 94 in New York City; 鈥淏uoyant鈥� (2020) at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York; 鈥淲here I鈥檓 From鈥� (2019) at The Gallery in Baltimore City Hall; 鈥淭he Ins and Outs: Figures in the Urban Landscape鈥� at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago; 鈥淣ew Icons鈥� at Mary Boone Gallery in New York; 鈥淧eople Person鈥� at Galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris; 鈥淪anctuary鈥� (2018) at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; and 鈥淭ransmission鈥� (2018) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.
Adams joins other artists such as Korakrit Arunanondchai, Hrafnhildur Arnard贸ttir, Xaviera Simmons, Mickalene Thomas, Andrea Zittel, and Firelei B谩ez, who have enlivened the Modern鈥檚 window on East 53rd Street since 2008. His work will be on view until fall 2022.
