Derrick Adams on the Celebratory Nature of Blackness
Interview by Essence Harden | Photography by Mickalene Thomas
Conversations with artists always carry the hope – or better yet, the potential – for me to toss my questions and rambling ideas into the metaphorical wastebasket once we get going. I love that moment when I stop flipping through my pages or the note-taking drops away, and suddenly we’re just there, present, rapping together on whatever thread has appeared. I think this conversation with Derrick Adams does just that.
A prolific artist who has worked across and in between genres – including performance, painting, installation, collage and sound – for over 30 years, Adams is invested in Black subjecthood through terrains of pleasure, leisure and cultural iconography, treating Black spatial realties as assertations for becoming, looking and criticality. Drawing from popular culture, consumer aesthetics and deconstructivist strategies, his work reframes everyday Black life as a space shaped by agency and the malady/impulse capital.
We spoke recently in his Brooklyn studio. I thought I’d cut into our time by being late, but we ended up talking and laughing for nearly an hour. It’s a good reminder, this conversation, that you can pick up and dive into, meet someone where they are, and trust that the exchange will take you somewhere worth going.
Derrick Adams, Day Wear, Evening Wear, 2017, vintage clothing patterns, acrylic and fabric on paper, framed: 62 1/2 x 43 x 2 in; unframed: 60 x 40 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Essence Harden: What are you working on at the moment?
Derrick Adams: I'm working on these two works for a group show at [Jeffrey] Deitch gallery in New York. It's an exhibition that's centred around ‘carnival’.
When this invitation came up, it worked well because I had been continuously interested in the concept of the carnival and Black identity, including the psychological aspects of a carnival, and being able to think about it not only in a fun or leisurely way, but also in a truly socially reflective way.
One of my favourite movies is The Wiz, which I reference constantly. It has these layers of complexity in the way that it operates as both performative and theatrical on the surface, like what you would expect on Broadway. But then, because they're Black figures, it has this whole other undertone that would not necessarily exist if the figures were different. The bodies are political. The representation is political.
EH: The surrealist impulse within The Wiz has become something quite different.
DA: I think that's how my work operates. People see different things when they look at my work, which is great for me because it shows me how the work translates to different individuals based on their relationship with the subject matter, or their lack thereof.
When people look at my work, they often mention the idea of joy, which is present in my work. However, if you are familiar with my practice and the way I approach work, you can see that many other complexities are woven through the subject matter, which display a more diverse range of impressions. Sometimes it could be joy, but also contemplation, indifference and things that are more about the subject, not necessarily entertaining the viewer. In my opinion, the subjects are in love with each other.
EH: When I was first introduced to your work, performance was central to your practice, and now you are talking about carnival as this space of performative actions. There's this quality of liveness between your paintings and the other installations and ephemeral-based works that you've done in the past. I'm curious about that through-line in your work now.
DA: The beginning of my career as an artist was mostly sculpture, performance and installation. At the time I was running a gallery, so a lot of my engagement with art was also through installing art. Being a curator allowed me to position the way that people engage with performance work.
Painting has always been a part of my installation practice, but I eventually began creating two-dimensional works. I started to ask, ‘What is an artist, and what is creativity?’. I wanted to see if I could transfer a physical space and a performative action to a stagnant object and still have the same level of interpretation and experience viscerally with a viewer. I thought of painting as occupying all of the spaces that I was occupying before, with the three-dimensional and the performative. I thought it would be a challenge for me to transition into, but I feel like the different mediums actually enhance the viewer's experience.
Left Derrick Adams, That's Music To My Ears, 2023, acrylic and collaged fabric on wood panel with custom wood frame and vintage antenna, 41 x 28.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Right Derrick Adams, Figure Walking Into the Light 23, 2018, acrylic paint, graphite and fabric on paper, 28 x 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
EH: What are your thoughts regarding the politics of Blackness in art?
DA: I'm a professor at Brooklyn College, and I've always taught since I graduated from Columbia [University]. Honestly, when people think about the politics of art or the politics of Blackness in art, that's something that I really don't use as a header in my work. It's really more of an ingredient. Because I'm Black, I don't think that I have to even think about politics, because I'm self-aware, and in a self-awareness of being Black and understanding that you are politics walking. It liberates me in my practice because I allow myself to explore things where the entry point is not necessarily literal.
A lot of things that I focus on are things that I feel are more of interest to Black people on an average day than some of the more political things that are put out in the world by artists that may not necessarily be of interest to the average Black person.
EH: It reminds me of that Toni Morrison quote where she was talking about Ralph Ellison’s concept of invisibility in Invisible Man, and she says, ‘Invisible to whom? Not to me’.
DA: Exactly. I never understood that book. I'm not invisible. The fact that someone is ignoring you means that you are visible. The fact that someone's ignoring you is a purposeful thing when you know that you are a physical thing. So, the idea of who's looking at you? Who do you want attention from?
EH: So you make work out of that space.
DA: I think part of the challenge for Black people who become intellectualised is that the interest of the audience shifts to people whom they're trying to get attention from, versus the people that they say their work is about.
Because I started off in a Black nonprofit gallery working primarily with Black creatives, my audience, in my mind, has always been pretty intact. One of the reasons I went to graduate school was to diversify the interpretations of my work. I felt I was receiving a lot of positive reinforcement within my community, but I knew my community was not the only world I would occupy. I went out and attended grad school to gain a better understanding of how others perceived my work. Not that I was going to change what I was making, but I wanted to be prepared to discuss why I do what I do with every audience in the world.
EH: I was thinking about how you and Mickalene Thomas have known each other for 30 years, and what that means to a practice and to a body of work. What does it mean when we are in study with someone? To whatever it is you're making, it still feels principal; this idea of Black study, as Fred Moten says, is about what you do with other people and how it manifests or is essential to what you do.
DA: I tell people all the time, my generation was the first generation of Black artists who could look at other Black artists as inspiration. The generations before us looked at Modernist, white artists, and mostly men. Even the artists whom we consider as our ‘gods’, like David Hammons, Romare Bearden, Emma Amos or Howardena Pindell, were responding to being excluded, and I don't feel that way. Because of them, I was made aware of exclusion.
We realised that we had to create our space. Because of them and because of the legacy they created, along with all the battles they fought, we realised that our culture was capital. This emerged with hip-hop, which became not only about music, but also about fashion and other commercial interests. We understood the value of Black culture because it became monetised.
I think my generation of artists, including myself, Mickalene, Wangechi Mutu, Kehinde Wiley, and all those artists, are very unlike other, more academic, more focused artists like Julie Mehretu or Glenn Ligon. They are all amazing, but our conversations are a little different. Our conversations are more focused on the celebratory nature of Blackness – like Mickalene's sexy Black female paintings, they're not comparing themselves to other paintings; they're just the product of an artist who has the ability to talk about what she wants.
EH: I always feel like the folks who do security in museums have the most interesting perspectives about the art because they're with it the most.
DA: Yes. And I think that's changed as well, because now that social media has become another tool of curation and observation, curators don't explore as much on an institutional level. You may see the same artists in museum shows repeatedly.
EH: I know, it's boring.
DA: And you wonder, how did they get into this show? When you start noticing that, and as you become more aware of the politics of art, you become less excited about the institutional relationship. You realise there are many other relationships beyond the institution. And the institution is not as powerful unless you are the invisible man, and you want to be seen. I think the institution is one of those things that Ralph Ellison was probably interested in – in the literary world – wanting to be seen in the way that other literary people who are not Black were being seen. And I don't think like that.
I basically think the opposite; that I'm not invisible, and I understand that to consider yourself invisible is to understand that the people who are looking at you are not seeing you on purpose. And as my mother would always say, ‘If I'm not at the party, then it wasn't worth going to. If I wasn't invited, then it wasn't the right party. If I'm not there, it's not popping, you know, it's their loss’. And I think like that in art.
EH: Can you talk about intentionality in your work?
DA: I grew up with mostly women – my mama, seven sisters and three brothers. So, a lot of my instinct for artmaking and my instinct for installation connect back to those experiences that I use in my work. I think that, as Black people, if anything, we have to be intentional with the things that we do, and we have to be intentional with our happiness. We had to be intentional with our sadness. We don't have the leisure of not being intentional. When we're laughing, we know we're laughing. When we're sad, we know this is fucked up, like I'm going through it. There is a certain level of intentionality that is about us channelling our feelings, because we know that we have many things to accomplish.
EH: That's the interesting thing about Black funerals, this sort of bizarre combination of all the things; you're crying, you're laughing, you're eating, you're dancing, then you might be crying again.
DA: Arguing... all that stuff. For me, that's how I think about art. I think of my work as a display of emotion, put into this space that allows Black people, as well as other people, to have a glimpse into the Black experience, not only through the emotional and the traumatic, but also in the more humanising aspect of how we see ourselves, which is really more about normalcy, or the pursuit of it. That's what I focus on when I'm making work. I'm always thinking about what my aunts would want to see. What would my cousin find interesting? Having that conversation with people who may or may not necessarily be as academically trained as myself in art. The non-art audience is the audience I like the most because they don't have to care. They don't care. They either like it or they don’t.
EH: It's raw.
DA: It's raw. If I bring people to a museum, a person who's not an artist, they always tend to pick out things that make them feel better.
EH: That makes sense.
DA: They're not looking at anything traumatic on the wall when they come to the museum. An art person tries to articulate the reason why an artwork is resonating with something that helps them cope with what's happening in the world outside the museum. But a person who is part of that system outside, who is aware of those things, comes into the museum space to have an enlightened experience. Trauma is not an enlightened experience for us. The framework is to pray and hope for the empathy of the people who are not necessarily empathetic to Black concerns, but that's not really working.
EH: There needs to be moral aptitude.
DA: You've got to be moral. You have to have it. Artwork is not going to make you moral. If anything, it is only going to confirm for the people who believe these things to be true that their feelings and emotions are real. But for people who already know they're feeling emotions that are real, they don't need to see that to echo their feelings. They want to understand the humanity of themselves; a three-dimensional nature of Black experience that is not projected as much in the world as what is projected through media. That's what I want to see when I go to the museum. What I believe Black people want to see of themselves in the world is what I focus on in my practice. I think that's what Black people, and all people, understand and gravitate towards when they're looking at my work.
EH: Yeah, thank you. Applause.
Essence Harden is a Los Angeles-based curator and writer.