Monacelli Publishes Highly Anticipated First Monograph on the Celebrated American Artist Derrick Adams

Over the past twenty-five years, Derrick Adams has developed a unique ability to synthesize and celebrate Black American life and culture through his beloved artworks. Best known for his collage-inspired paintings of people constructed out of geometric blocks of color and engaged in leisure activities, Adams brings the everyday experience of Black Americans to the forefront, capturing moments of joy, resilience, and celebration. Derrick Adams is the first monograph to survey his entire career, highlighting the vibrant energy of his work and the breadth of his practice.

The book organizes his artwork into three sections named for themes that recur throughout his practice: Channeling, Signaling, and Mirroring. In Channeling, we see works that investigate ideas surrounding the ubiquity of television and the emotions that media representation can conjure in ourselves. The works in Signaling explore the depth of the visual language Adams has created, in which visual clues, cultural motifs, and text construct what he calls “seriocomic imagery.” In Mirroring, we experience images born of Adams’s desire to see Black American experiences mirrored in art, in part rectifying the dearth of such imagery in art history. At its core, Adams’s project is a reinvigoration of the Black figure in art, an intention seen throughout the works in the book.

Derrick Adams begins with an introduction elucidating the book’s three themes, written by curator and Adams’s studio manager Alyssa Alexander. An in-depth conversation between Adams and art-world veteran Sandra Jackson-Dumont explores Adams’s beginnings as a gallerist in New York, tracing his many roles as arts educator, community builder, and studio artist. ICA Philadelphia curator Hallie Ringle writes about the formal properties of Adams’s work and how they both strengthen and inform the narrative qualities of his art. Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and New York Times columnist Salamishah Tillet explores the cultural contexts of Adams’s work, speaking to the powerful ways he images Blackness. And curator Dexter Wimberly writes about Adams’s multidisciplinary practice, illuminating how his exhibitions, performances, and interactive installations are inextricably linked to his overall artistic vision.

Derrick Adams releases ahead of a major midcareer survey of Adams’s work, ViewMaster, opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in April 2026. This book, presenting 150 of his most significant works to date alongside important scholarship, establishes him as one of the most important American artists working today.

Floater 93, 2020 Acrylic and fabric collage on paper Each: 50 x 50 in. (127 x 127 cm) Overall: 50 x 100 in. (127 x 254 cm)

Only Happy Thoughts, 2024 Acrylic and fabric collage on wood panel 60 x 60 in. (152.4 x 152.4 cm)

About the Artist

Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore, MD) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Adams’ work celebrates and expands the dialogue around contemporary Black life and culture through scenes of normalcy and perseverance. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute, New York, in 1996 and graduated with an MFA from Columbia University, New York, in 2003. In addition to his critically acclaimed art practice, Adams has held numerous teaching positions and is currently a tenured assistant professor in the School of Visual, Media and Performing Arts at CUNY Brooklyn College. He also holds an honorary doctorate from Maryland Institute College of Art. He has extensively exhibited throughout the United States and his work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, among many others.

About the Authors

Alyssa Alexander is a curator and the studio manager for Derrick Adams.

Sandra Jackson-Dumont is a curator, educator, cultural strategist, and former director and chief executive officer of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

Hallie Ringleis the Interim Director and Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.

Salamishah Tilletis Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark, and a Pulitzer Prize–winning contributing critic-at-large at The New York Times.

Dexter Wimberly is an American curator based in Japan and the co-curator of Derrick Adams’s midcareer survey, View Master, at the ICA/Boston.