DERRICK ADAMS (b. 1970, Baltimore, Maryland) addresses the way in which media, entertainment, and social structures shape individual identity and public perception of African-American culture through performance, collage, sculpture, and installation. Adams’s new Floater series celebrates and depicts the black body at leisure, relaxing in undefined bodies of water. A departure from more structured collages and photographic work, Adams employs a looser, painterly style in this series revealing the artist’s hand. Adams received his MFA from Columbia University in New York in 2003 and a BFA in Art & Design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1996. His work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Studio Works, and Perfoma. Adams is the recipient of a 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany award; an honored finalist for the 2011 William H. Johnson Prize; and most recently the recipient of the 2016 Studio Museum Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize.
