Derrick Adams: Patrick Kelly, The Journey

Derrick Adams: Patrick Kelly, The Journey is based on artist Derrick Adams’s extensive research into the archive of the influential African-American fashion designer Patrick Kelly (1954–1990), housed at the Schomburg Center. It is an inHarlem project presented in partnership with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the New York Public Library’s Countee Cullen Library branch. 

At the center of Patrick Kelly, The Journey is Adams’s “Mood Board” series, a new body of work responding to Kelly’s legacy as a formalist who imbued social context and humor into his creations. These abstract collages incorporate Kelly’s vintage clothing patterns, as well as his iconic fabrics, colors and shapes: bold and colorful geometric forms, contours of the female body, and buttons and other embellishments. The works exalt Kelly’s formal excellence while demonstrating Adams’s ongoing interest in deconstructing, fragmenting and manipulating structure and surface.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website