I Am that I Am organized in collaboration with Salon 94 and KARMA, is a survey exhibition of over 30 works by the Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Alexis Coard. While living with schizoaffective disorder, art making was Coard’s healing and spiritual outlet, in which he created a poignant, signature body of work comprised of sensitively rendered portraits of Black men with beards. He found solace and a divine purpose in Christian spirituality, including Biblical tenets surrounding the symbolic wisdom and reverence of beards. Coard once stated, “I use bearded Black men as symbolic expression for possible change for the African-American male community... that we as a Black male people can be victorious, achieving needed healing and unity.”

Derrick Alexis Coard: I Am That I Am is on view from June 27th through August 15th, 2024 at Salon 94, 3 East 89th St, New York, NY 10128 and at Karma, 172 East 2nd Street, New York from June 26–August 23, 2024. 

Special thanks to Matthew Higgs and the White Columns team for their incredible support, and to all the lenders who made this exhibition possible.

The exhibition is accompanied by two Online Viewing Rooms, I Am That I Am  featuring an additional number of works by Derrick Alexis Coard accompanied by excerpts from texts and contributions from Matthew Higgs, Dustin Yellin, Jonathan Lyndon Chase and Moritz Scheper and Teach Us Love bringing together a further selection of Coard's works accompanied by Imaginary portraits of a one big self a text by writer Andrea Applebee specially commissioned for the exhibition. 

For more information please contact us at: office@marcjancou.com