It’s hard to imagine feeling weightless or buoyant in this day and age. Perhaps that’s why we should all take a moment to consider it. Imagine yourself sheltered in the embrace of a colorful pool floatie as you drift along the surface of your swimming pool. Now imagine a Black person you’ve never met doing the same exact thing. This is what “Derrick Adams: Buoyant,” now at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Pete, asks of us.
It’s not a radical idea. Or is it?
In the 1960s, a group of Black people swimming in a segregated pool in the South was revolutionary. When a group of white and African American integrationists entered the Monson Motor Lodge swimming pool in St. Augustine on June 18, 1964, the hotel manager poured acid into the pool and police arrested the demonstrators.
Derrick Adams: Buoyant
Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Dr. NE., St. Petersburg.
Open to the public Sept. 19-Nov. 29 (open to members only now)
Face coverings, advance tickets, social distancing and temperature checks required (COVID-19 info)
mfastpete.org
Adams’ paintings are dramatically different from the protest images we’ve been seeing so much of lately, but there’s more to Black experience than the struggle. There’s also joy.
“Regardless of all the things that are happening to Black people around the world, we still find time to connect with each other,” Adams has said in past statements about his work. “If we were constantly in this place of battle, we really couldn’t exist. We need time to replenish our love and faith and joy.”
Adams’ “Floaters” series, shown in “Buoyant,” boldly asserts that Black people are worthy of leisure and joy. Still in 2020, images of Black people at leisure are rare, but they do exist.
Rare images of Black leisure are just one of many reasons to go see “Derrick Adams: Buoyant at the MFA this fall.”
The main reason to see the show: You may not have noticed, but Adams is kind of a big deal.
Adams’ artwork is featured in the collections of many Black celebrities, including Kasseem Dean (aka Swizz Beatz) and Alicia Keys’ private art collection (The Dean Collection), R&B singer Tamia and her husband’s, plus former NBA player Grant Hill’s (The Grant Hill Collection of African American Art). Adams is so popular with collectors that you don’t often get to see so many of his paintings displayed together in one place.
“We are so fortunate that they [The Hudson River Museum in New York] are loaning it to us, because it’s comprised of 12 private loans,” MFA Curator of Contemporary Art Katherine Pill told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “These are works that are not on view to the public normally, so we’re really excited to see them all together here in Florida, and we are the last stop.”
On a quiet Thursday afternoon, before the MFA officially reopened to the public, I walked through “Derrick Adams: Buoyant” with Pill and the MFA’s Manager of Communications & Public Relations, Lashonda Curry.
The first thing you encounter upon entering “Derrick Adams: Buoyant” at the MFA is the June 1967 issue of Ebony featuring “MLK’s Tropic Interlude.” The article features photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King vacationing in Jamaica, including a photo of MLK relaxing in the pool. These photos, along with Adams’ personal pool-time memories and experiences, provided the inspiration for Adams’ “Floaters” series.
Despite being born and raised in Atlanta (MLK’s birthplace), Curry told me she’d never seen these images of MLK before.
“It was really shocking to me, but in a good way, to see him relaxing in a pool and walking on the beach. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, is that Dr. King without a shirt??’ I even called home to tell my mom and she couldn’t believe it! Like most people, when I think of Dr. King, he’s protesting, preaching, marching, getting arrested. With these photos, you see him in a different light. It really normalizes him and makes him relatable, which is basically what Derrick Adams wants people to come away with when they see his paintings portraying Black leisure.”
Next to the Ebony magazine spread, there’s a self-portrait of Adams on a black unicorn floatie he designed himself.
“This is a print that’s actually from our collection,” Pill told CL. “We purchased it last year through funds from Jim Sweeny.” It’s a woodblock print with gold leaf and collage done at Tandem Press.
“It’s a puzzle block technique,” says Pill, “which means that they used 100, or close to 100, blocks of wood. And they had to do, I think, 30 print runs, because in a puzzle block print, no two blocks of wood can ever touch each other during the same run; otherwise, there’s a white line.”
Given the technical challenges of creating a puzzle block print, I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would bother.
“This is the aesthetic he’s known for,” Pill said. “He is so inspired by theories of deconstruction and this idea of multiple parts making up one whole, or one person. It’s really about trying to express the wholeness of identity in all these little parts, and I think that’s why the face and the bodies are always sort of broken apart in that way. So the color variations are very important.”
Entering the large gallery, where the 12 loaned Derrick Adams paintings hang around a swimming pool installation, I literally said, “Whoa.” The installation is so immersive, it feels like being at a community pool in summer. I’d entered Derrick Adam’s world of Black joy and leisure, and it’s beautiful.
My eyes went straight to a four-panel painting taking up an entire wall at the far end of the gallery. “Floater 74” looks like a pool party in a painting. A Black man reclining on a bright yellow pizza floatie stretches across two of the bright blue panels. He shares the pool with 11 other men, women and children. They float on a black swan, pink flamingos, and a bright orange innertube. Their swimsuits are a collage of West African and American fabrics.
“The person that owns this is lucky,” I said to Pill.
“That’d be Alicia Keys,” she replied.
This is when Curry and Pill directed my attention to “Floater 78,” owned by Tamia and Grant Hill. In this painting, three children sit together on a swan floatie. A woman I assume is their mother smiles beside them.
The room is full of paintings like this. Each one features a Black person or a group of Black people relaxing on floaties in a pool. They are colorful, joyful, and full of life.
This joyfulness is one of the reasons why Adams thinks his work is so popular with Black collectors.
“My work represents a life that is aspirational and reflects the way that some of these people live,” Adams said in an interview with Artnet’s Charles Moore. “After working all day, or being in an environment where you have to deal with so many different types of people, you want to come home and see things that are relatable. I don’t think you want to come home to a noose. The audience I’m interested in wants to see how they live and see what they aspire to be.”
Click here to see a roundup of related talks happening in conjunction with “Buoyant” at the MFA St. Petersburg.
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This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2020.
