Derrick Adams Kicks Off Nashville's Artville Fair with Black Collage Artists' Talk
Written by Adam Schrader
Derrick Adams kicked off Nashville's first Artville fair, held in the city's blossoming Wedgewood Houston neighborhood, with a moderated artist's talk about his practice and Black expression in collage and contemporary art.
The talk was moderated by Katie Delmez, the senior curator at the Frist Museum in Nashville, who organized an exhibit on Black collage currently on view featuring 80 collage and collage-informed works by 52 artists. Adams has a piece exhibited in that show.
Adams, who humbly shrugs off his rock star status in the art world, recently debuted his first show with Gagosian and has works in the collections of prestigious institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
"In 2009, I started to really dig into collage work. It really came out of this desire to think about sculpture and performance because that's where I started as an artist," Adams said in the art talk Friday. "I liked the physical process of sculptural work I felt was very physical and very involved, and performance because of the layering of information I was really interested in."
Adams is best known for making art that expresses happiness and optimism about Black life. He said this motif was inspired by his viewing of lesser-known pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King on vacation in Jamaica.