Derrick Adams Brings Two Decades of Black Leisure to ICA Boston

Brooklyn-based polymath Derrick Adams has opened 'View Master' at ICA Boston, his first comprehensive mid-career survey. Spanning twenty years of practice, the exhibition assembles over 100 works—including sculpture, collage, and performance—that shift the lens of Black portraiture away from trauma toward the radical simplicity of leisure and domesticity. Adams, a Baltimore native, has spent the last two decades refining a geometric, cubist-adjacent visual language that elevates the mundane into the monumental. By centering his subjects in moments of play—floating on pool rafts or gathered in living rooms—he connects his work to a lineage of Black American life often left out of the formal art historical canon. The show marks a significant milestone for an artist who has become a cornerstone of the New York scene, offering a necessary look at the breadth of his kaleidoscopic world.