Cey Adams

Cey Adams was born in New York in 1962 and began as a teenage writer on the streets and subways of the city in the late 1970s, coming up alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the downtown scene. He appears in the 1982 documentary Style Wars. He exhibited early, and then took a turn almost no one else of his generation took: into graphic design, at the exact moment the music his generation had grown up with was becoming an industry.

As founding creative director of Def Jam Recordings he built the visual identity of hip-hop's defining label. Album covers and campaigns for Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, the Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z and Mary J. Blige came out of the Drawing Board, the design studio he co-founded within the label. That body of work reached an audience no gallery could, and it did so carrying the visual habits of graffiti — hand-drawn letterforms, hard contrast, collage — into mainstream American design.

His studio practice is built on collage and typography. The Trusted Brands series takes the logos and packaging of American consumer life — the marks people recognise before they can read — and reworks them by hand in paint, paper and screenprint, so that the smoothness of corporate identity is returned to something drawn and fallible. The work sits close to Pop, but its subject is brand loyalty as a form of belonging rather than as a joke.

He has published and designed several books, including DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip-Hop for HarperCollins, the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, and The Mash Up, which he curated. He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Walker Art Center.

His touring survey, covering forty years of art and design, was shown as Departure at the Stone Gallery, Boston University, in 2022 and at the University of North Texas in 2023, and as ETCetera at NewStudio Gallery, Saint Paul, in 2022. In 2016 the Smithsonian Institution commissioned ONE NATION for the National Mall; the work entered its permanent collection.

SELECTED CV

Born 1962, New York, NY, USA

Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, NY, USA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2023 Cey Adams: ETCetera — 40 Years of Art and Design, NewStudio Gallery, St. Paul, MN, USA

Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, LA, USA

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2024 Cey Adams: Universal, Artemizia Foundation, Trinidad, CO, USA (solo)

2023 Cey Adams, Departure: 40 Years of Art and Design, CVAD Gallery, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA (solo)

2022 Cey Adams, Departure: 40 Years of Art and Design, Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA (solo)

2015 The Rise of Sneaker Culture, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, USA

2011 Looking at Music 3.0, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

Black Flag, mural, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, USA

2007 Limited-edition collection for Muhammad Ali, Adidas

1980s Founding creative director, Def Jam Recordings; co-founder of The Drawing Board, New York, NY, USA

Selected Public and Institutional Collections

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY, USA

New York University, New York, NY, USA

Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Selected Publications and Monographs

Cey Adams and Bill Adler, DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip-Hop, HarperCollins, New York, 2008

Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label, Rizzoli, New York, 2011

The Mash Up: Hip-Hop Photos Remixed by Iconic Graffiti Artists, Hat & Beard Press, Los Angeles