Derrick Adams: View Master
Lee Ann Norman | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st July 2026
The challenge of a mid-career survey is to sum up an artist’s trajectory while it is still evolving. A case-in-point is Adams, whose colourful paintings of Black people at leisure convey “Black joy”. His figurative works are popular, but what is the enduring idea? One writer suggests it is identifying those banal moments “that make individual lives whole”. Or, says this critic, Adams shows how Black people can exist within a Eurocentric culture yet “create something else entirely”.