Derrick Adams is the artistic director of Inviting Light and curator of the light-based site installations. His artwork spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, sound, and public activation and explores how identity and personal narrative intersect with American iconography, art history, urban culture, and Black experiences. Adams’s work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and shown in public spaces at the National Mall, Rockefeller Center, and Chicago’s Navy Pier. He is the founder of Charm City Cultural Cultivation, a non-profit organization that supports and encourages underserved communities in Baltimore through The Last Resort Artist Retreat, a residency program that subscribes to the concept of leisure as therapy for the Black creative; The Black Baltimore Digital Database, a collaborative counter-institutional space for collecting and safekeeping the data of local archival initiatives; and Zora’s Den, a community of Black women writers.
Baltimore artists can submit creative proposals for Inviting Light programming in 2025. Apply by March 31, 2025! Visit the submissions page for details and sign up for updates.