I’ve long admired the artist Derrick Adams. His series of bright, color-blocked paintings depicting Black people happily lolling atop assorted inflatable animals in swimming pools tell a story about Black leisure, privilege and identity, but what comes through most profoundly is a sense of ordinary joy.
I love the curly-haired child astride a playground’s spring-mounted unicorn in 2023’s “Braving the Path.” Where is he galloping off to at such fantastical speed? With his intense focus and open-mouthed smile, it surely is a place of wonder.
Or “Self-Portrait on Float,” which features Mr. Adams himself as a solitary figure — a Black man in varying shades of brown, against a backdrop of sea foam blue. His arms are wrapped around a black and gray unicorn with a rainbow mane, a gold chain draped around the fictive animal’s long neck. Mr. Adams’s gaze is cast directly at the viewer, and he wears a toothy grin.
Maybe they are both the same person; they’re certainly of similar stock, one young and the other grown up.
There’s more to Mr. Adams’s paintings than Black joy. But that complicated emotion is what tugs at the heart.
“When I was younger my grandfather would always critique us as kids if we were laughing too much or being too happy. It would trigger him. He would say: ‘You always smile. Why are you smiling so much?’” Mr. Adams told me when I visited him in his hometown, Baltimore.
Joy, for his family and for generations of Black men and women, was not so simple. “That is a level of fear, I think, of people assuming that this person’s behavior is somehow a representation of a larger group’s priorities.”
Is joy itself somehow unserious?
Mr. Adams does not think so. He left Baltimore to study at Pratt and become an artist. He maintains a studio in Brooklyn and is represented by the Gagosian gallery. But he returns to Baltimore when he wants a dose of normalcy.
It isn’t quite a picket fence that surrounds his house here, but the white wooden slats nonetheless evoke a quaint welcome, thanks to the black painted hearts that decorate it. He told me that some of the folks who live in this modest neighborhood have assumed the whimsical house serves as a day care center, despite no evidence of children. He has spent the last six years turning it and some adjacent properties into a retreat for himself and other artists who have, at some point, called this mostly working-class city home.
Mr. Adams invites his neighbors to visit his artist enclave when he hosts events, but mostly they don’t come. “I think sometimes people don’t think that it’s for them,” he explained.
This sense of distance is disheartening, but not terribly surprising. The art world is aloof, snobby, often off-putting, and its inscrutable offerings seem disconnected from daily life. It has a lot in common with fashion, which is how I first encountered Mr. Adams.
He worked with the designer Kerby Jean-Raymond on his spring 2019 Pyer Moss collection, his colorful family portraits — sweet images of brown-skinned children, a bespectacled Black man cuddling an infant, a multigenerational barbecue — reproduced on dresses, T-shirts and tunics.
Mr. Adams’s Baltimore home is filled with ephemera, as well as prints of his own work and that of other artists, some rising and others well established, such as his best friend, Mickalene Thomas. Mr. Adams purchased a good deal of art during the pandemic. His own work was selling vigorously, thanks to his established reputation as well as the heightened fashionableness of Black figurative painting in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement. (That flush of desire has, for many trendy collectors, since faded.)
This month, Mr. Adams is marking a milestone in his career: the first retrospective of his work. “Derrick Adams: View Master” opened April 16 at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. The show includes over 100 examples of his creative output — painting, sculpture, collage, performance, video — from the last 24 years.
On a wall at the end of a long wooden table are two especially striking prints by Mr. Adams. They’re images of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Mr. Adams has depicted these historic figures dressed for a relaxing summer sojourn — a picnic, perhaps. Shown against a background of pages from the Negro Motorist Green Book, Dr. King wears a green madras sport shirt. Mrs. King is in red and white gingham. They are simply existing in a moment of contentment.
They are the answer to a question that has gnawed at Mr. Adams: When renowned Black activists aren’t protesting and groundbreakers aren’t smashing open doors and breaking glass ceilings, what are they doing? What were Martin, Malcolm and Coretta doing when they weren’t marching?
“I think that people assume that we are innately protesters,” Mr. Adams told me in his rapid-fire delivery. “They think that if something happens to any marginalized group, Black people should be right there. They think we have a protest hand guide.”
“I’m looking at all these civil rights activists,” Mr. Adams said, and “really thinking about, what else do they do?”
As my gaze lingered on those images, I was surprised by my melancholy. It seemed like such a long time ago when certain spaces were neutral ground, certain moments were off the clock. In the past, we had the capacity to be shocked and horrified when lines were crossed. There were still places too mundane, too inconsequential, to require active defense.
Today, those places and occasions that should exemplify blissful nothingness are expectant with dreadful possibilities or some aching emotion we haven’t yet defined — and not just for men and women of color, but for any marginalized person or anyone unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A stop for gas, an elementary school drop-off, a Sunday church service, a trip to a public restroom, a swim meet — all have the capacity to become unnerving occasions.
Some people fear what might happen to them. Others fret about what they or their children may witness. Banal moments have disappeared in an age of ICE crackdowns, mass shootings, bathroom policing, trolling, doxxing and warring inside once-quiet cul-de-sacs.
Everything is pregnant with the possibility of the catastrophic. There are no in-between moments. There are no clear interstitials. No connective tissue.
“When you see issues where people, Black people, are being harassed, it’s usually Black people just minding their business doing something like having people come to the park where you have a family barbecue. You may be going into a shop and people mess with you,” Mr. Adams said. “I think the idea of seeing normalcy is a trigger for some people.”
In 2018, a Dallas man named Botham Jean was eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream in his apartment when he was murdered by an off-duty police officer who’d walked into the wrong unit, saw him there and said she feared for her life. In February 2020, an unarmed Ahmaud Arbery was killed as he was jogging in a suburban Georgia neighborhood by residents who found his presence suspicious. In March 2020, Breonna Taylor was killed by a police officer who broke into her home after she had fallen asleep on her bed watching television.
This year, after the Trump administration escalated its deportation efforts, people of color in Minneapolis were questioned about their citizenship and their accent while pumping gas or driving for a ride-share service or headed to a doctor’s appointment or doing any number of other things that most people would describe as not just banal but irritatingly so.
Mr. Adams understands the importance of the banal. It breeds connections. It contributes to our humanity and makes us whole. His work makes me long for it.
“Family Portrait 10” is another painting of his that delights me. It’s an oil painting of three Black children: two flower girls in white dresses and a ring bearer in a black suit and blue bow tie. They have broad noses and brown skin. Their stance is awkward; their expressions are eager.
I look at their sweet faces and can imagine them dancing with the rest of the wedding party. I can see them eating cake and making a mess and then laughing at their own silliness. But I also remember the image of the chubby-cheeked, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in his blue knit cap with white floppy ears. He was detained by federal agents as he returned home from school with his father in Minneapolis. I think about the newlywed who was held by ICE when she went to move into her husband’s home on a Louisiana military base.
Minnesotans of all stripes raised their cellphones to document the loss of the mundane in their neighborhoods. In Chicago, plastic whistles became tools of resistance, used by residents to raise the alarm that their peace was being disrupted by their own government. And all sorts of people found their Easter Sunday interrupted by a president hurling expletives at an adversary on behalf of Americans.
Mr. Adams focuses on the sweet nothings. Those are the moments that make individual lives whole. The events that seem inconsequential, the detritus of a life — an old report card, faded swim trunks, a crumpled grocery bill, a rusted bicycle, the yellowing cardboard fans advertising a funeral home that always seem to be stashed in the pews of Black churches — are the things that add up and allow us to make sense of the so-called big stuff.
But I have begun to realize that many of the banal events that are central to Mr. Adams’s work have vanished from real life. You can’t always count on what should be a mundane jaunt through the park, or a grocery run, to be uneventful. These moments, which should be ordinary, have become worrisome and fraught. The idea that anything is quotidian seems sadly obsolete. Nothing is banal anymore.
I don’t mean to say that we no longer feel safe anywhere — although for some people, this might well be true. The loss of the banal is different. It’s the loss of what, for Black people in America, has been a hard-fought ease. Of going to the park or the grocery store without thought. Of being able to breathe deeply and not even notice that you’ve exhaled.
When I look closely at Mr. Adams’s paintings, I still see Black joy. In fact, I see joy writ large. But there is no longer anything commonplace about it.
Robin Givhan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic and a former senior critic at large for The Washington Post.
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