The Brooklyn Rail

For the last twenty-six years, Derrick Adams has created multimedia works that are witty and sharp, playful and earnest, thoughtful, studied, and calculating. Adams centers Black people, often in ways that subvert stereotypes and in situations that center joy and leisure rather than struggle or sorrow. Figures frolic in swimming pools on floaty toys, enjoy road trips, sit atop sparkling horses, or wear stylish clothing. Through more than one hundred works, including never-before-exhibited pieces from the artist’s personal archive, View Master—Adams’s first museum retrospective—highlights how effectively Black people can engage and exist within historical Eurocentric notions of beauty and culture, while simultaneously creating and existing within something else entirely.

Organized by independent curator Dexter Wimberly and the ICA’s Assistant Curator Tessa Bachi Haas, in collaboration with Adams, the show eschews chronology and uses an immersive exhibition design, allowing visitors a glimpse inside of Adams’s creative mind. Across performance, painting, collage, and public projects, Adams has developed a vocabulary composed of shared visual signifiers in Black communities: streetwear like puffy winter coats and 8 Ball jackets, the brick-faced edifices in many urban landscapes, pop culture characters like Fred Sanford and the Fresh Prince, or the colorful television test bar pattern he saw broadcast as a youth. Recurring themes of “Play,” “The Urban Landscape,” “Domestic Space & Family Life,” “Television & Media,” and “Performance” allow visitors to experience the breadth and depth of his practice in ways that reward inquisitiveness, making connections, discovery, and an openness to alternative views on traditional notions of race and gender.

One of the earliest works in the show, Hood Rats (2000), is an installation of Mickey Mouse ears affixed to durags and suspended from fishing line against a sky blue background. Pairing these protective cloths Black men and boys tie around their heads with the theme park souvenirs coveted by children worldwide turns a derogatory term for urban Black youth from menacing to benign. Nearby, Eye Candy (2023), a six-panel screenprint against one of the many custom wallpapers Adams created for the show, features an underwear model one might have seen in a 1970s Ebony magazine advertisement. The model, a fit man with a tiny, shapely afro, hands clasped behind his back at the waist, is minimally dressed and shown in various “flavors,” like the rainbow wallpaper over which the panels sit and the lollipop that obscures a portion of the right side of his face. Here, Adams’s use of color softens what could be perceived as threatening—the strong, able-bodied Black man—and shifts our focus to how notions of beauty and masculinity, and perceptions about race and gender, shape the consumer landscape. Deeper into the exhibition, the rainbow-lollipop background of Figure in the Urban Landscape 32 (2019) functions similarly. The bright candy colors disarm the two women, one of whom wears a form-fitting lemon-yellow dress while holding a small child on her hip as she passes another on the street wearing figure-flattering jeans and a T-shirt.

Performance has been fundamental to Adams’s practice, providing the seeds for many of his more familiar ideas, seen later in his two-dimensional work. Early performances are on view through documentation, such as photographic stills and silent video, and include 2011’s Can We Talk (Henson) and The Sleep Over Under and Inside (Beuys). They are like one-man shows, featuring the artist flexing skills gleaned from engagement with puppetry, poetry, and hip-hop to pay homage to those who have influenced his work. In each video respectively, he stands on a ladder to make shadow puppets against the wall and kneels on the floor under a gray, seemingly felted, blanket-like tarp draped over himself. Works made during this same year—One Nation Under a Groove of Instruction (Piper) and I Just Crush A Lot (Hammons), in which he performs in the spirit of Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons (1982–84) and David Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983)—situate Black artists in conversations about canonic performance traditions. Rather than a demand to rewrite artistic histories, Adams makes an argument for expansion—to include the theatricality seen at storefront churches, the braggadocious nature of hip-hop, or the elegant restraint of the high-class social club.

As his practice evolved, paintings and collages on paper became a way to “perform” in two dimensions, always centering Black people, culture, and aesthetics in physical space. Works from the ongoing “Future People” series (2017– ), for example, swap out old television set frames for spaceship portals, providing views to alternative and unimagined tomorrows filled with Igbo items, interstellar imaginary objects, and celestial human hybrids. Plentiful examples of paintings and collages highlight Adams’s ongoing engagement with play and joy over the years: the leisure-seeking “Floaters,” a “Boxhead” collage, figures in domestic spaces, and seekers of safety from the “Sanctuary” series, based on The Negro Motorist Green Book. The show’s namesake, View Master (2025), however, serves as the manifestation of the boundless possibilities the artist seeks to propose. Charles Harrison, the Black industrial designer who revamped the beloved, classic toy in lightweight red plastic in 1958, is rendered on the lenses of the object in Adams’s vibrant painting. Beneath the logo the sentence, “Double consciousness is the dual self-perception,” is a subtle reminder that our existence can consist of “both-and.” View Master becomes an invitation for Black people to see each other—not just be seen—in the multitude of their shades and hues.