Shawn "JAY-Z" Carter is not just the first hip-hop artist to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but he is also a 23-time GRAMMY award-winner. With multiple businesses, accolades across the recording and film industries, recognition throughout the philanthropic community, Carter is a globally dominant force of popular culture.

Carter has sold over 100M albums worldwide, retains control of his own master rights to his music, founded preeminent entertainment company Roc Nation, curates the successful “Made In America” festival, and acquired luxury spirits brands Armand De Brignac and D'usse. In 2013, Carter launched Roc Nation Sports, whose roster includes Robinson Cano, Skylar Diggins-Smith, Kyrie Irving, Kevin De Bruyne, Marcus Rashford, Romelu Lukaku, CC Sabathia, and Todd Gurley. In March 2015,

Carter became a co-owner of the global streaming service Tidal, a subscription-based music, podcast and video streaming service, which is currently majority owned by Square, where Mr. Carter now serves on the board. Mr. Carter also serves as the Chief Visionary Officer of TPCO Holdings Corp.

In film and TV development, Carter has helped bring to light some of the most poignant stories of our time, including recent projects: Peabody award-winning Time: The Kalief Browder Story, Rest In Power: The Trayvon Martin Story, and the critically acclaimed award winning six-part Meek Mill documentary Free Meek.

In addition to his impact on the entertainment world, Carter continues to use his platform for social good including the work of his Shawn Carter Foundation and serving as Co-Founder of The REFORM Alliance.

Derrick Adams is a Brooklyn, New York-based artist whose critically admired work spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, and sound installations. His multidisciplinary practice engages the ways in which individuals’ ideals, aspirations, and personae become attached to specific objects, colors, textures, symbols, and ideologies. His work probes the influence of popular culture on the formation of self-image, and the relationship between man and monument as they coexist and embody one another. Adams is also deeply immersed in questions of how Black experiences intersect with art history, American iconography, and consumerism. Most notably in his Floater series, he portrays Black people at leisure, positing that respite itself is a political act when embraced by Black communities. The radicality of this position has materialized in Adams’ work across his Deconstruction Worker, Figure in the Urban Landscape, and Beauty World series.

In formal terms, Adams’ practice is rooted in Deconstructivist philosophies related to the fragmentation and manipulation of structure and surface, and the marriage of complex and improbable forms. His tendency to layer, hybridize, and collage not only images and materials, but also different types of sensory experiences, link the artist to an estimable lineage of pioneers ranging from Hannah Höch and Henri Matisse, to William H. Johnson and Romare Bearden. In Adams’ art, the process can also be understood as an analog: “Everything that we are is based on a specific construction,” he once remarked.

Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore, MD) received his MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Pratt Institute. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program and was the recipient of Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, a Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship, a Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.

Adams has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions such as Cleveland Art Museum (2021-2022); Henry Art Museum, The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2021); SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film, Savannah (2020–2021); Hudson River Museum, Yonkers (2020); Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg (2020); 12 E 94th St New York S94The Gallery in Baltimore City Hall (2019); and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018). The artist has mounted public installations commissioned through MTA Arts & Design at the Nostrand Avenue LIRR Station, Brooklyn (2020–ongoing); and RxART at NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem (2019–ongoing). His work has been featured in notable group exhibitions, including Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair, Kent State University Museum (2021–2022); Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem (2020), now at the Seattle Art Museum (2021); Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth., a Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition (2019 - 2020); and Performa, New York (2015, 2013, 2005). His art resides in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, among many others. He has recently established an artist program and residency in his hometown of Baltimore called The Last Resort.