With ‘Funtime Unicorns’ at Navy Pier, artist Derrick Adams embraces Black joy with playground toys

This is hard to write after a long Chicago winter, but: You’re going to have to head to Navy Pier soon. You’re going to have to walk among the tourists. I know, I know. All those families from Iowa walking slowly. Still, pick a time, between now and the end of June. That’s how long Derrick Adams’ “Funtime Unicorns” will be in Polk Bros Park across from the main pavilion. To describe it is to risk sounding corny: Adams, one of the most intriguing artists of recent years, installed four sculptures of Black unicorns, modeled on pool toys.

“Sculptures,” though, is really just art-world speak for ordinary steel-spring playground horses. They resemble white unicorn pool floaties, with rainbow manes and gold chains.

Only they’re black.

It’s a seemingly minor distinction, yet, as a break from our usual visual cues, it’s almost provocative. Adams, a Baltimore native in his early 50s, has made his name with a quietly subversive subject: Black joy, Black leisure, Black rest. To borrow the title of his recent exhibition in New York City — “I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You” — it’s also a pretty digestible subversion. The work is colorful, vibrant, drawing on the geometry of Cubism, the everyday palate of Jacob Lawrence, feel-good memories of childhood. The Black figures in his paintings, animations, performance work and playground toys smile and hug, read on hammocks, listen to music, bicycle, swim and barbecue. It’s all so easygoing that I told him recently, in a phone conversation from his Brooklyn studio:

“To describe your art to someone who’s never seen it is to make it sound schmaltzy.”

He laughed.

“I know!” he said. “But corny, schmaltzy — Black artists should be able to do corny work, too. I mean, look at David Hockney. Or someone like Alex Katz or Nicole Eisenman. They paint people sitting on a couch listening to records or hanging out at the beach. Those artists have the ability to represent certain everyday things they just want you to see — behavior that is not sensational. And they don’t have to explain any of that. They paint figures who occupy a space, then allow the viewer to interpret the image the way they want. But most Black artists are tasked with being very descriptive. They need to explain, so people can understand our point of view. And myself, I’ve never felt this need. If you think about Black culture in America — the music, the fashion — it never came with explanation. You just got into it. I think that art is in a place like that right now.

“So when I hear that an image (in my work) is so normative, it’s corny — yes! Normal life is corny. It’s not exciting. But coming from a history of people who experienced trauma — who still experience trauma — we need to highlight moments just like that, refreshing alternatives to other, equally significant histories. My unicorns are black. It pushes at the idea of what fantasy can be. A unicorn is not a real thing. Why can’t it be another color?”

That made me think of an old TV clip I recently saw of Carl Sagan on “The Tonight Show” in the late 1970s. Johnny Carson asks what he thought of “Star Wars.” Sagan found it a failure of science and imagination: Despite its galaxy far, far away, where any life-forms that do exist would look nothing like Earthlings, most of the main characters are white humans. Adams, similarly, reveals the limitations of our cultural imagination. Or maybe, he just brings the art world up to date. Last year, when “Funtime Unicorns” was installed in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, Adams was tagged often on social media by New Yorkers, visitors, kids, adults — “not just Black people,” he says — all riding the unicorns.

When I went to Navy Pier the other day to check out the unicorns, I found children and parents and out-of-towners on the sculptures, but when I asked what they thought of the unicorns, not one person (regardless of race) had made the connection that these were black unicorns. Only when I told them about Adams did the color of the riding horse register.

Which suggests Adams is on to something.

Luckily then, Chicago is getting its Derrick Adams moment this summer.

Besides the Navy Pier works (installed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the EXPO Chicago art exhibition), Adams recently had a show of paintings at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery (which has given him three shows in five years). Also, through July 5, “Funtime Unicorn: Ruby Rides Through Four Seasons,” an animated short, will be shown nightly against the building known as Merchandise Mart, as a part of ongoing Art on theMart projections.

Indeed, in a gallery setting, Adams’ works pop with color, warmth and a remarkable feel for interlocking shapes, avoiding the didactic yet nearly daring a viewer to find fault with images as mundane as Black adults on pool floaties and Black children playing with puppets. One of his larger paintings, “Town & Country,” is a sorta self-portrait of a Black man with a full beard and a hipster hat, walking into the woods, offering, as Adams has said, the image of a Black man who is well-rounded, metropolitan but relaxed in nature.

Arguably, however, Adams is even sharper with public art.

Through June, his immersive mural “The City is My Refuge” fills the upper part of Penn Station in New York City with faces and bodies receding into a dense green jungle. For New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he’s made murals of cars in its windows, the drivers passing billboards for ‘90s Black cinema mainstays like “Juice.” A couple years ago, for the Milwaukee Art Museum, he painted a 93-foot mural of several generations of that city’s Black residents. This summer, he’ll be part of an exhibition on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., that reworks monuments. He stops short of calling “Funtime Unicorns” a monument, but adds: “The old guard’s attitude is ‘This is there, it’s going nowhere.’ But I think the future of monuments is about the experience that the viewer is having with it.”

He started taking playground toys seriously several years ago, when, as an elementary school teacher, he noticed how students influence students and the visual language of the equipment itself. “Kids, when they hit a playground, mirror their experience at home, but in a public space. So it becomes this political space where children are first socialized.” That use of recognizable childhood objects carried over from one of his earliest works, made after leaving art school: He dressed a set of cheap African sculptures sold to American tourists in Ken and Barbie clothing, as a way of reflecting who those crudely conceived images were actually representing — Black Americans.

“I went through the academic art process,” he said. “I am not thinking about the art world when I make something now. I’m interested in the people just walking by, who have no reason to stop, who weren’t sent to this spot by a critic or a curator. They just happened to come across something that drew them in. It’s an offering to a community.”

Should you want a Funtime Unicorn, you can buy one: They cost $50,000 apiece. Some art collectors have bought one, some for their backyard, some for their home; Adams said he’s been approached by people eager to donate them to city playgrounds.

But the ones at Navy Pier will not be sold, he said.

He likes the idea of his black unicorns lingering in a space for months, receding into the culture, feeling ordinary. He said he wasn’t thinking about Black joy when he made them. He didn’t even coin that phrase; critics and curators and fans did. But he’ll take it. “I would prefer being associated with ‘Black joy’ to being called ‘an artist of trauma.’ Many Black artists are. I wouldn’t want to be that. If I had to choose, I would prefer joy.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com