Cey Adams: Partnering with a Visionary
It’s been such a unique and tremendous opportunity for the team at Mad Arts to work with visionary artist Cey Adams over the past several months. Adams is the industry legend behind some of the most iconic album covers, logos, and advertising campaigns in music and pop culture history.
The co-founder and CEO of Mad Arts, Marc Aptakin “met Cey for the first time when he was the featured artist for a charity event we hosted in the building. I instantly loved the guy and connected with him as if I'd known him my whole life. He is truly one of the best humans I've ever met. That is Cey the person. Cey the artist is even better — if that’s possible. Or maybe it's the person that he is that makes his art so amazing!”
This past April, we were honored to host his touring exhibition, DEPARTURE: 40 Years of Art and Design, which was on view in Dania Beach from April 6 to May 26, 2024. To debut the collection, our team hosted an exclusive meet-and-greet, offering the local community a chance to interact with the artist and gain deeper insight into his creative process.
DEPARTURE: 40 Years of Art and Design
A visual timeline of Adams’ artistic evolution, this retrospective exhibition features more than 60 of his pieces. It encompasses photography archives, mixed media collages, paintings, textiles, fashion, street art, contemporary fine art, and more. His body of work has been influenced by themes of pop culture, race and gender relations, and cultural and community issues.
“The singular focus of my art is to be a bridge that brings people closer together,” explains Adams. “This career retrospective is a reflection of how graffiti, street art, and Hip-Hop have unified people and in turn created a movement with lasting impact on popular culture.”
The first solo retrospective exhibition for Adams, DEPARTURE celebrates and surveys his extensive practice and transformative role in multiple cultural arts and music movements over the last four decades. The chronological work on display begins in the late 1970s, when he learns to hone his art skills by painting graffiti on the streets and trains of New York City.
The exhibition sees street art gradually leak into the city’s high-end galleries as Adams becomes the founding Creative Director for Def Jam Recordings, where he gives visual life to the Hip-Hop movement and creates visual identities, album covers, logos, and advertising campaigns for musical giants like Run-D.M.C., Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, The Notorious B.I.G., Maroon 5, and Jay-Z. A large installation featuring more than 50 album covers conceived and designed by Adams headlines this part of his career before exploring his studio practice. DEPARTURE is organized by the Boston University Art Gallery and curated by Liza Quiñonez, Street Theory.
About Cey Adams / About the Artist
Cey Adams, a New York City native, emerged from the downtown graffiti movement to exhibit alongside fellow artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. He appeared in the historic 1982 PBS documentary Style Wars, which tracks subway graffiti in New York. Adams served as Creative Director for Hip-Hop mogul Russell Simmons’ Def Jam Recordings, where he co-founded the Drawing Board, the label’s in-house visual design firm.
He exhibits, lectures, and teaches art workshops at institutions including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Brooklyn Museum, Museum of the City of New York, New York University, Temple University, MoCA Los Angeles, Stanford University, and Howard University, among others. He co-authored DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip-Hop (HarperCollins); designed Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label (Rizzoli); and designed the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap (Smithsonian/Folkways Recordings), a box set including a 300-page book and nine-CD set.
