Silver Lining: The Prints of Derrick Adams

Exhibition Dates: October 8–December 19, 2025

Reception: Thursday, October 9, 7–9 pm

Over the past six years, artist Derrick Adams has created nearly twenty vibrant prints in collaboration with Tandem Press. This exhibition highlights the results of that partnership—works that celebrate leisure, domestic life, and personal style through bold color, repeating patterns, and cadenced compositions.

Adams first came to Tandem Press in 2019, following a recommendation from artist Mickalene Thomas. His first print with the studio, Self-Portrait on Float, shows him lounging on a unicorn pool float—gold-leaf accents, rainbow details, and all—Adams gazes out at the viewer with his head gently tilted, surrounded by a sea of vivid teal. 

Throughout these prints, we see a celebration of rest, domesticity, recreation, and style—recurring motifs in his larger body of work—filtered through the medium’s rich graphic possibilities. Working closely with Tandem’s collaborative printmakers, Adams has taken full advantage of the studio’s technical resources and experimental spirit, resulting in prints that pulse with color and rhythm. 

Silver Lining not only documents a significant chapter in Derrick Adams’s artistic practice but also celebrates the democratic and expansive nature of printmaking. Through these works, viewers are invited into scenes that affirm rest as resistance, leisure as power, and joy as a vital, everyday act. 

About the Artist:

Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore, Maryland) is a multidisciplinary artist who closely considers the influence of popular culture on the formation of self-image. His work also questions how African American experiences intersect with art history, American iconography, and consumerism. He received a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Columbia University. He is also an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio program. He has received multiple notable awards, including a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (2019), Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize from the Studio Museum in Harlem (2016), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2009). Derrick Adams has been exhibiting extensively since 2001, including solo exhibitions at the California African American Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Hudson River Museum, The Gallery in Baltimore City Hall, Museum of Arts and Design, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. His work has also been included in numerous important exhibitions at institutions such as the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, The Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS1, and the Brooklyn Museum. His work is held in many permanent public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Derrick Adams lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

This exhibition is supported by the Anonymous Fund.