2024 New Editions: Derrick Adams, Where My Girls At?
Derrick Adams, Where My Girls At?, 2024. Click to view.
An artist with countless irons in the fire at all times, one of the bodies of work Derrick Adams has developed in recent years is Beauty World. A series of large-scale paintings began in 2019, these images depict mannequin-like portraits of men and women with steely gazes and expressive hairstyles. Inspired by the display windows of beauty shops, wig stores, and braiding and nail salons he often passes in his Brooklyn neighborhood, Adams created this series to reflect on cultural and social rituals connected to beauty. The resulting portraits construct and deconstruct demonstrations of self-representation. They explore Black identity and empowerment achieved through acts of styling, camouflaging, costuming, and adornment.
Where My Girls At? is part of the newest series in this body of work, which Gagosian debuted in a solo exhibition titled Derrick Adams: The Strip in Seoul, South Korea earlier this month. In the earlier Beauty World images, Adams presented mannequin heads as portraits removed from their environment. Now, in the new works, Adams has taken a step back to depict the full display window filled with groupings or communities of mannequin heads adorned with colorful wigs, surrounded by other elements of the storefront, and often framed by the exterior brick wall. In Where My Girls At? the cars passing by on the street behind the viewer are reflected in the glass of the display case, and one can imagine that their own reflection would coincide with the appearance of the mannequin head figure gazing out at them.
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.
