Of all the influences that have fueled Derrick Adams’ artwork, public television is one of the greatest.
“I grew up on PBS,” said Adams, a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist whose work is on display starting Wednesday at Tandem Press on the north side of Madison.
“A lot of those shows were (the) result of things that happened in the Civil Rights era,” added Adams, whose work highlights contemporary Black life and culture. These shows, he said, “were created to help kids in the inner city, who were not getting the same level of exposure to education, (to) learn how to read and write.
“Now, as an artist, I’m looking at and researching how important programs like PBS are to the fabric of America. A lot of people know more about Black America from the media than from actually knowing black Americans.”
Adams is an award-winning artist, a graduate from both the Pratt Institute and Columbia University, and has been showcasing his work in professional art exhibitions since 2016.
Though he’s a photographer and performer as well, Adams is most known for his acrylic and collage portraits as well as his sculptures, which use the language of shape and color to explore Black identity and how it is influenced by entertainment and pop culture.
His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.
For the show running this fall in Madison, Adams created nearly 20 vibrant prints in collaboration with the local fine art printmaking studio Tandem Press. “Silver Linings: The Prints of Derrick Adams” will be on display at 1743 Commercial Ave. through Dec. 19.
Tandem celebrates Adams’ new show at “Needle & Thread: Vinyl Records in Artistic Practice,” an event at Lola’s Hi/Lo Lounge on Thursday, Oct. 9 that will raise funds toward a book celebrating Adams’ prints. The event includes a conversation between Adams and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Faisal Abdu’Allah, to “explore how music influences identity, emotion and memory,” then moves to Tandem at 7 p.m. for a free public reception.
Adams recently spoke with the Cap Times about the origins of his art style, its influence on children’s art curriculum, and why he loves coming back to Madison.
Colors and shapes are throughlines in your work. How did you land in that style?
It varies. In some of my work, I juxtapose West African fabric patterns and colors with polka dots and stripes, patterns you’d see here in the States, to show that Black Americans are really more of a collage of many different Black cultural experiences. My studio is in the inner city area, where there’s a heavy concentration of different types of people, and different cultures of Black people from Caribbean and African to European. My work explores how all those cultures are in communication and influenced by African American culture.
In your “Boxhead” sculpture series, you have wooden geometric shapes inside a TV box, clothed in wild patterns. What was the specific inspiration for this?
That was part of a series I had called “Live and In Color”and it was about the representation of the Black figure in media and the exaggerated sense of representation that goes with a role that’s given. The Boxheads represent the larger than life personalities that are projected through TV roles.
In your collage work and paintings, even though they show significantly more facial details, you use the same blocked out color scheme. Why?
That particular series of work was breaking down the Emergency Broadcast System’s color bar, which is basically the calibrations that the TV makes up to implement the tones you see when you’re watching a show. So that’s talking about how that calibration then represents the people who are present on the screen. That’s why some paintings have bright and dark tones and others have more neutral Earth tones.
In the “Let’s Start Over” series, you use a similar color language and frame your work of these kids with puppets in a TV. Would you say television is the biggest influence on your work?
A lot of my work makes reference to television and advertisements that are attached to identity. I do like exploring principles and personalities we inherit from watching television and being exposed to certain media. My work is about having fun exploring what’s fabricated (and) what’s real.
Would you say that your art expresses a negative or positive opinion on the influence of TV and pop culture?
There’s really no judgement. I don’t think people should presume everything they see on television to be real. But while I might look at something and be offended by it, other people might look at it and be amazed.
There are elements of media that speak to different people differently. I’m just trying to amplify or highlight aspects of media that stuck with me as a person. One of those things was PBS, specifically “Sesame Street.”
You have an undergrad degree in art education. Were you intentional about the way you used color and shapes to draw in younger viewers?
Yes. A lot of my choices in my work are based on my understanding of color from an academic side and on my understanding of art philosophy and how kids learn using colors, textures, patterns, things like that. At Pratt, I learned how to teach art and that made me a bit more aware of how to create environments and experiences for kids to engage with.
Once a month I get an Instagram tag from some teacher using my art to teach their kids. I get it all the time. Last week, someone tagged me saying they were using my art for a lesson and one of the kids made a bunch of art inspired by a painting of mine. That kind of thing is just awesome.
You’ve visited Madison several times since 2019. What do you enjoy about our city?
Every time I come, I discover some new place or some new something. Jason Ruhl at Tandem takes me to the coolest spots. He took me to a place that was decorated top to bottom like the ’70s with tons of vinyl records and a turntable.
There’s always something new in Madison and, as someone who’s always curious and looking for new materials to work with, that’s one of the things I find the most enjoyable about Madison.