Being long in the tooth, I’m struck by how prevalent African-Americans are on TV now compared to my childhood, when Nat King Cole’s show was too much for white America to handle. Racial progress managed to proceed from there in fits and starts but mostly to allow whites to delude themselves into thinking that integration was a fait accompli. Here, Derrick Adams distills this problematic history into a kind of folk memory with a fizzy stylistic amalgam of African motifs and outsider-art naïveté.
His centerpiece installation features walls painted to resemble test-pattern color bars. Strips of dashiki and kente-cloth fabric replicate the same within funky old TV sets depicted as a series of mixed-media hangings that also serve as backdrops for videotaped performances playing nearby.
In another gallery, collages incorporate old TV Guide issues with cover stories about black television stars like Gary Coleman, Redd Foxx and Bill Cosby. A final room looks like an empty, darkened yoga studio with rows of mats facing a wall dominated by an arrangement of night-lights plastered with images of 1990s late-night TV psychic, Miss Cleo.
In Adams’s hands, the television screen becomes a surreal frame for race relations. But more than that, it serves as a metaphor for a living-color America that still refuses to look beyond black and white.