Derrick Adams

Funtime Unicorn: Ruby Rides Through Four Seasons builds upon Derrick Adams’ famed Funtime Unicorn project celebrating Black joy, love and play. The animation – realized in collaboration with a graphic designer, The Channel – unfolds across four seasons and begins with Ruby in a playground before she embarks on adventures through joyful dreamscapes. Ruby’s journeys feature a majestic display of colorful backgrounds and light tunnels across the 2.5 acres of THE MART, while visitors will also watch flowers bloom, leaves fall, and snow drop in the playground as she returns for each season. Viewers will be transported by the narration of a young girl, with background vocals by Cleo Reed, set to an original jazz-trumpet soundscape by Dave Guy from The Roots.

Funtime Unicorn first appeared in Adams’ signature Floater series, a collection of vivid portraits of Black people in various states of rest and play as a life-size inflatable pool float before Adams made Funtime Unicorn into a unique and interactive sculpture.

Funtime Unicorn: Ruby Rides Through Four Seasons coincided with EXPO Chicago’s 10th edition (April 13 to 16, 2023) when Funtime Unicorn was also be part of a new public commission on Chicago’s Navy Pier. Adams’ ART on THE MART commission is presented in partnership with Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Born in Baltimore and based in New York, Derrick Adams celebrates and expands the dialogue around contemporary Black life and culture through scenes of normalcy and perseverance. He has developed an iconography of joy, leisure, and the pursuit of happiness with a multidisciplinary practice that encompasses paintings, sculptures, collages, performances, videos, and public projects. Adams synthesizes representational imagery with planar Cubist geometry to produce multifaceted figures and faces that address the richness of the Black experience.