CAAM presents the work of New York-based multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams, who creatively employs collage, sculpture, video, installation, and performance to examine how television and media shape contemporary culture.

Images of classic African American television shows like Sanford and Son and luminaries including Oprah Winfrey, Diahann Carroll, and O.J. Simpson along with representations of television monitors with SMPTE color bars abound in Network, which features large-scale, brightly colored mixed media collages, a performance video, and installations where visitors can record themselves. Adams riffs on late-20th century African American television iconography while at the same time critiquing consumerism and capitalism, raising questions about race, class, and gender as expressed in popular culture at large, and television entertainment in particular. These pertinent ideas take on a certain significance in Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world. Derrick Adams: Network is the artist’s first major museum exhibition in Southern California.

The recipient of the 2016 Joyce Alexander Wein Prize, 2014 S.J. Weiler Award, and a 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, Adams received his MFA from Columbia University, BFA from Pratt Institute, and is a Skowhegan and Marie Walsh Sharpe alum. His exhibition and performance highlights include: Greater New York ’05, MoMA PS1; Open House: Working In Brooklyn ’04, Brooklyn Museum of Art; PERFORMA ’05, ’13, ’15; Radical Presence & The Shadows Took Shape, Studio Museum in Harlem; The Channel, Brooklyn Academy of Music; and is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

This exhibition is curated by Mar Hollingsworth, Visual Arts Curator and Program Manager, CAAM.

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