A DEEPER RECESS 004: an interview with Derrick Adams

We speak to Derrick Adams, artist of Black America with a deep interest in architecture & social spaces.

22 April 2025

Welcome to the fourth edition of A Deeper Recess, our occasional longform interview with an artist or architect. Here, editor of recessed.space Will Jennings interviewed Baltimore-based artist Derrick Adams at his exhibition Situation Comedy, presented at Gagosian’s Davies Street space in London from 13 February to 29 March, 2025 (see here).

Adams’ paintings present imagined scenes from Black Americana, imbued with feelings of leisure and relaxation. There are also ideas of consumerism – present through material objects such as Dominos Sugar and a bag designed by Telfar Clemens – that speak to contemporary notions of escape, even if it comes with history and political weight.

(l) Derrick Adams, portrait photograph by Emil Horowitz. (r) Derrick Adams, Situation Comedy at Gagosian. Artwork © Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

Previous projects also look at the Black figure, as well as Black history – here we also discuss with Adams his 2018 body of work, Sanctuary, a three dimensional reimagination of the Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual guidebook for Black American road-trippers published by New York postal worker Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1967, during America’s Jim Crow era. It is one of many exhibitions by Adams that create three dimensional space and sculpture with flat painted works.

Away from painting, Adams also founded The Last Resort Artist Retreat, a residency in Baltimore for Black creatives not as a space for making, but for escape and relaxation using the concept of leisure as therapy through curated experiences conducive to rejuvenation. He is also behind the Black Baltimore Digital Database, a digital home for citizen history and social memory as a counter-institutional space for collecting, storing, and safekeeping data from local archival initiatives.

While not specifically about architecture or the built environment, all Adams’ works and initiatives have a deep interest in the subjects, and this is where we started the conversation:

This exhibition is less architectural than previous bodies of work, but it's very space-based, it's about place.

I think about architecture all the time. I think about interior/exterior space, domestic space, shared space. I use rulers a lot, I use different mathematical processes associated with architecture. I think about these things a lot and I don't really think that you cannot incorporate those things if you have an academic experience with art through institutional influence, there's no way that you can make these types of works without somehow calling on influences based on years of looking at slides of paintings and art. It comes through in the work, even unintentionally, because that's basically how artists learn and train their decision making in composition – we become aware of the way space is established through line and colour.

In earlier works I was interested in architecture and would meet with architect friends. A series titled Deconstruction Worker was directly comparing the body to architecture and how architecture is informed by the human body, versus how the human body is influenced by architecture. Places are built based on the scale of the figure, the way they move, the way they occupy space and gather. Especially with urban spaces, places are designed to assist in the movement of where bodies go and how they operate - sometimes negatively, sometimes positively.

(l) Man in Forest Green (2016). Mixed media collage on paper. 24x18". From the "Deconstruction Worker" series. Artwork © Derrick Adams Studio. (c) Head 17 (floor plan) (2011). Mixed media collage on paper. 36x36". (r) Elevation Section 1. (2011). Vinyl shelf liner, graphite, coloured pencil, on paper. 36x36". All works from the "Deconstruction Worker" series © Derrick Adams Studio.