2023 New Editions: Derrick Adams, Eye Candy
Derrick Adams, Eye Candy, 2023. Click to view.
Through his artwork, Derrick Adams presents explorations and celebrations of Black culture and identity in America. Although he is primarily a painter, his practice also includes collage, sculpture, performance, installation, and video. In recent years, he has added printmaking to that list as he has been creating fine art print editions with Tandem Press.
Adams’ largest print project to date, Eye Candy, comments on the media’s tendency to present Blackness, specifically the Black male body, as something to be consumed. This work continues Adams’ interest in examining American popular culture from a Black perspective, its relationship to consumerism, its prominence, and the value system currently forming around it.
In Eye Candy, six panels repeatedly depict the same Black male figure, each dressed in a different colored set of clothing. A collage element depicting a lollipop covers one eye of the man as he stands at an angle with hands behind his back and gazes out at the viewer. Adams created Eye Candy after he came across a small underwear advertisement in an early issue of Ebony magazine that beckoned to be blown up, embellished, decontextualized, and reintroduced to the world as a figure of desire and consumption.
The source image for the work reflects a man from the civil rights era wearing what Adams has referred to as his “” his “under-armor.” The vibrant garment choices read not only as a variety of colors but also of flavors—cherry, orange, lemon, green apple, blueberry, grape. These bright candy colors reappear behind the prints as a custom wallpaper that Adams also created. The wallpaper depicts the top half of the lollipop that appears in the prints, looking like a giant candy-swirled rainbow. All these candy-colored visual elements emphasize the allure of the figures and support the commentary Adams makes with this artwork. The power of seduction associated with the outward presentation of the Black male body in media confronts the awareness of the politics it inherently embodies—politics placed on it by society’s standards surrounding masculinity.
Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore, Maryland) received his BFA from Pratt Institute and his MFA from Columbia University. He also holds an Honorary Doctorate from Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2022, Adams established Charm City Cultural Cultivation, a non-profit organization that supports and encourages underserved communities in the city of Baltimore through events conducted by three entities: The Last Resort Artist Retreat, The Black Baltimore Digital Database, and Zora’s Den.
Adams’s critically acclaimed art practice has earned him multiple notable awards, including the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (2019), a Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), a Studio Museum Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2016), and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2009). Adams has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions such as The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland (2022); The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2021); Hudson River Museum, Yonkers (2020); and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018). His work has been featured in notable group exhibitions at places such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, and Kent State University Museum. His art is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Birmingham Museum of Art, among many others. Adams lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and he is currently a tenured assistant professor in the School of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts at CUNY Brooklyn College.
