BOSTON, MASS.- In April 2026, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Derrick Adams: View Master, the first survey of New York-based multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore). The exhibition presents over 100 works spanning 25 years of the artist’s practice, including never-before-seen works from Adams’s personal archive, immersive exhibition design created by the artist, and new works debuting at the ICA. Adams’s paintings, sculptures, collages, performances, videos, and public projects celebrate the richness and complexity of everyday Black American life, and over the past two decades, have transformed these moments into a distinct iconography. The exhibition is organized by Dexter Wimberly, Independent Curator, and Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator, ICA/Boston. Derrick Adams: View Master opens at the ICA, where it will be on view from April 16 to September 7, 2026, before traveling to the Queens Museum in New York (Fall 2027).
At the ICA, the artist’s work will extend beyond the galleries with the museum’s first major facade commission—a monumental installation wrapping the exterior of the ICA building. The commission offers Adams’s bold reimagining of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) test pattern, also known as television color bars. The exhibition grows in June with the addition of the artist’s Funtime Unicorn riders—a collection of interactive sculptures positioned near the museum’s entrance for visitors to engage and play with. The facade commission will be on view from mid-April 2026 through April 2027 and the Funtime Unicorns will be on view from June 2026 through September 2026.
“Television was my first classroom. Since 2014, I have incorporated color bars into my work as background and wall treatment to explore pivotal shifts and moments in Black television from the 1970s through the 1990s,” said Adams. “The color bars signal that something has been switched ‘on.’ Wrapping the ICA’s facade in this vibrant pattern sparks a necessary dialogue about representation in contemporary culture and the systems that shape how we see.”
“Whether through intimate portraits or large-scale public projects, Adams offers compelling narratives of affirmation and celebration. His engaging and uplifting work, including the first major artwork to occupy the ICA’s facade, invites audiences from across the city to experience Adams’s joyful and visionary practice,” said Nora Burnett Abrams, Ellen Matilda Poss Director at the ICA. “We envision this as the first of many exterior projects to come, bringing art outside the museum to expand our welcome and engage the public in new and meaningful ways.”
Derrick Adams’s work centers Black subjects depicted in vibrant scenes of rest, recreation, and self-care. Play is a central theme in Adams’s practice. Braving the Path, 2023, depicts a young Black child riding a Funtime Unicorn, referencing the interactive sculptures that Adams will stage outside of the ICA. His vibrant explorations of contemporary life convey a palpable sense of power, referencing many pop culture moments. In another work, Only Happy Thoughts, 2024, Adams portrays a Black woman adorned with bright blue eye shadow and Tootsie Roll candies alongside African masks and elements drawn from Black art traditions. This painting is one of several vibrant and multifaceted portraits that convey his serio-comedic storytelling, establishing situations starring both real and imagined characters through humorous juxtapositions. In one of Adams’s interactive, sculptural works, Cool Down Bench (RBG), 2023, the artist recalls childhood memories of neighborhood ice cream trucks with a large-scale, functional sculpture modeled after the popular red, white, and blue ice pops. However, in this instance, the bench features the colors of the Pan-African flag—red, black, and green—representative of Black liberation.
“Adams’s use of bold colors, dynamic compositions, and layered textures creates a powerful visual impact that underscores the depth of the Black experience,” said Wimberly and Haas. “His work invites visitors to see the beauty and strength in the everyday lives of Black people with a sense of humor and whimsy.”
In Derrick Adams: View Master, the artist invites visitors to engage with a world where cultural and creative freedom is essential. The exhibition’s sub-title, View Master, is an ode to the toy that the Black inventor Charles Harrison redesigned in 1958 and reflects Adams’s distinct ability to capture the Black gaze. For the ICA’s presentation, Adams debuts a new work titled View Master, 2025, a large 6 x 8-foot painting featuring a view master—a stereo picture-viewing system that creates the illusion of a 3D world. Adams’s worldbuilding extends to the galleries, where wallpapers designed by the artist create an immersive visual experience for visitors. Derrick Adams: View Master is a testament to Adams’s commitment to expanding the conversation around what it means to live and thrive in today’s world.
The exhibition unfolds across five thematic and interconnected sections: “The Urban Landscape,” “Domestic Space & Family Life,” “Play,” “Performance,” and “Television & Media.”
Born in Baltimore and based in New York, Adams is finely attuned to the architecture of everyday city life: the streets, storefronts, and public spaces that frame The Urban Landscape. His work pulses with the city’s visual rhythms, where signs, awnings, and scaffolding create a layered language. In Adams’s hands, these elements become active participants—they shape identity, hold memory, build community, and capture the perpetual change of the city. Storefronts and stoops become platforms for performance and self-determination, and everyday scenes become monuments honoring Black experiences. Threaded through the artist-designed wallpaper in this section is a recurring reference to the Negro Motorist Green Book. It was published between 1936 and 1966 by Victor Hugo, a U.S. Postal Service Worker, to guide Black travelers across North America to safe destinations during the violent and racially segregated Jim Crow Era. In Adams’s work, the Green Book is both a landmark of Black American history and a powerful lens to consider travel, rest, and leisure within shifting social and political terrain.
Domestic Space & Family Life are recurring themes across Adams’s work. He creates scenes that are deeply personal, where figures often lounge, strike poses, and gather within graphic, pattern-rich interiors. This new, site-specific wallpaper depicts a kitchen, living room, family room, bedroom, and bathroom. Transforming the gallery into a vivid domestic stage, this section explores how our homes, objects, and the people we live with are active and vital expressions of identity, containers of memory, and beacons of cultural inheritance. Here is where taste, care, aspiration, and the most radical ideas can take form. For people whose identities and experiences often face erasure in public life, Adams suggests that the power to design one’s environment becomes a potent act of shaping one’s reality.
Play is central to Adams’s practice. In this section, lively carnivals, birthday picnics, pool parties, and family gatherings burst with color and joy. Adams’s background teaching elementary and middle school often comes through in how he thinks about play as a political act. This wallpaper features the playground Adams designed on the National Mall in 2024, titled America’s Playground: DC. The location in the U.S. capital carries deep resonance: it was home to the first desegregated playground in the country. The artist sees playgrounds as early arenas of negotiation—where rules are tested, identities are formed, and power dynamics are explored. A new work from Adams’s iconic Floater series depicts figures reclining on pool floats—unguarded, radiant, and fully at ease. By elevating these everyday scenes to monumental status, Adams celebrates play, pleasure, and leisure as forms of resistance and vital expressions of freedom.
Performance is a foundational yet lesser-known aspect of Adams’s career. Many works across the exhibition reference stage and cinema through scale, composition, and characters. This gallery brings together more than 20 years of Adams’s performance practice, evoking poetry, hip-hop, church, and theater. For him, performance is at once entertainment and a complex negotiation of agency for many Black and brown communities. It becomes both shield and spotlight, where stereotypes are dismantled, and new stories are told. In this way, Adams honors the creativity, agility, and resilience required to navigate a world that often diminishes Black life, asserting a presence that demands recognition and envisions a brighter future.
Television & Media have long been at the heart of Derrick Adams’s practice—he affectionately calls TV his “first classroom.” The colorful pattern on the adjacent wall references the iconic Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) test pattern—better known as TV color bars—the graphic grid once used to calibrate TV screens across America when the artist was a child in the 1970s. Since 2014, Adams has sampled and remixed these patterns in his work, tracing pivotal moments in Black television from the 1970s through the 1990s. This section delves into how representation shapes identity, aspirations, and power in our changing media landscape—a particularly urgent discussion given the funding cuts plaguing public broadcasting in the United States, and the current use of media as a potent political weapon.
