On View: themodernnyc . The Modern Window: Derrick Adams . “What can I reveal that has not been shown? It always goes back to the simplest of things, like normalcy,” the artist Derrick Adams has explained. “Black people—not entertaining, just being, living. Letting people deal with that as reality.” In his paintings and installations, Adams celebrates moments of everyday Black life and explores how popular culture pervades contemporary reality. The starting points for these particular paintings are two popular classics of 1990s Black cinema, Juice and Set It Off. These works imagine a moment in the ’90s in which drivers pass by billboards for the films in distinctly late-twentieth-century models of then-futuristic cars (a DeLorean and a Nissan 300ZX). Gazes ricochet across the paintings: one passenger seems to peer out, engaging us passersby on the street, while another seems to look into the eyes of the towering face pictured on the billboard before him. The joys of cruising in a c...