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At Penn Station and in a Chelsea gallery, artist Derrick Adams offers fresh sights and stories

Artist Derrick Adams stands among the art works he created for a new installation at Penn Station.
When Derrick Adams was commissioned last year to create a visual-art installation for Penn Station, he didn’t have a hard time figuring out what he might do with the space. It wasn’t just due to the success he’d had in designing other public-art projects that helped the Brooklyn-based artist determine what might work in this specific venue. It was also all the time he’d spent there as a traveler, waiting for the Eastern Corridor Amtrak to take him back to his hometown of Baltimore.
“Penn Station has a bleakness to it – it’s a commuter space that’s not designed to be comfortable,” Adams said, smirking, during a conversation earlier this month. “I was really aware of every corner. Making a piece for it was not that big of a challenge.”
“The City Is My Refuge,” commissioned by the Art at Amtrak program, drapes the walls, columns and even some of the ceilings in Penn Station’s concourse and rotunda. Faces in many skin tones peek out from lush green trees and bushes, rendered in Adams’ signature style: part cubism, part childlike cut-outs, all warm colors, representing all races.
This kind of sympathetic outlook has long been central to the different types of art the 53 year-old Adams creates. Now, it's fueling a moment in which his work is increasingly being recognized in both the public-art and fine-art realms. In addition to his Penn Station installation, Adams recently opened a major show of new paintings, “I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You,” at the FLAG Art Foundation gallery in Chelsea.
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