PRESS RELEASE

Miami, FL ( November 1, 2017 ) – Primary is pleased to present Black White and Brown, a fully immersive installation by multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams, his first solo exhibition with the gallery.

This uniquely equanimous exhibition unveils all-new works and reconvenes previously-unavailable segments from performances and presentations at MoMA/Ps1, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem and Performa, among others. Presented together as a collection for the first time, Black White and Brown highlights an important part of Adams’ conceptual framework: the semiotic consideration of the institutional presentation of artworks.

Black White and Brown incorporates bold geometric black and white patterns, some with various shades of brown, in reference to the black body as a conduit or apparatus for performative mechanisms in the work. Living within Adams’ lexicon of intentionality, these works (dis)assemble emblems of cultural identity, social-political commentary, and formalized structures. Demonstrating power and reverence, familiar and unfamiliar imagery is presented against the hard-edged grid of the gallery’s black and white interior wall patterns.

Set in a virtually unrecognizable Primary Projects space, mixed media objects stand in direct conversation with Adams’ bold Op-Art application as a backdrop. While the artist’s installation represents an element of engagement with formalism, his work is, at the same time, thrust into the contemporary art space, destabilizing an excessive focus on representation in lieu of provenance and cultural context. Following the genesis of Adams’ artistic practice,

Black White and Brown adapts his signature collage to the built-environment, at once offering viewers access to works past while journeying into a vision for the future. 

Opens December 5 at 5 PM
On view until February 3, 2018


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Derrick Adams (b. Baltimore, MA, 1970) lives and works in New York. Collections include the Baltimore Museum of Art; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Exhibitions include ON, Pioneer Works, New York (2016); Network, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2017); Patrick Kelly, The Journey, Studio Museum in Harlem/Countee Cullen Library, New York (2017); Sanctuary, Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018); Transmission, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2018); Where I’m From, Baltimore City Hall (2019); Buoyant, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York (2020); Derrick Adams and Barbara Earl Thomas: Packaged Black, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2021); LOOKS, Cleveland Museum of Art (2021–22); and I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2023). Adams has received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2009), Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize from the Studio Museum in Harlem (2016), Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (2019).

Primary (Est. 2007) is a context and research-driven curatorial collective with an emphasis on public art. We thrive amongst the self-taught, working-class misfits, who explore the margins of a new Americana through pungent, human-focused narratives. Our program engages with the raw and uncanny, celebrating border voices, bootleg culture, and intergenerational commentary, connecting the new and unseen with broader audiences and evolving collections.

For further information, please contact info@thisisprimary.com